Our plucky band stumbles over the clods and craters of the drying waterhole, nervously skirting two tonnes of slumbering white rhino. Thulani Msetfwa, our guide, has already told us not to worry about this behemoth, as only its smaller, rarer cousin — the black rhino — ever takes a pop at people. ‘So, any black rhinos around here?’ I venture. ‘Oh yes,’ Thulani grins. ‘Plenty.’
The rhino snorts stertorously, its leathery nostrils raising a mini-mushroom cloud of dust. I freeze as the massive head swings towards our scent: that front horn must measure nearly a metre. What if Thulani’s remarks have dented pachyderm pride? But just as I’m checking out the surrounding scrub for climbable trees, the beast flops over again on its armoured flank. But to be sure, I scamper into the security — and welcome shade — of a thorny thicket. It’s a classic safari scenario: hot sun, big game, endless miles of African bush. Except these miles are not endless. Mkhaya Game Reserve, whose dusty trails I’m now tramping, lies in western Swaziland, the smallest country in the southern hemisphere.
This bijou kingdom is not new to me. Work first took me to Swaziland more than ten years ago. I remember then how its 17,000-odd square kilometres had seemed a mere postage stamp on my map of Africa, yet had opened up like a Tardis once I entered. Now I’m back for a week’s whistle-stop tour and I find myself bamboozled all over again.
Take Malolotja. For old time’s sake, I start my trip by dropping in on this little-known nature reserve in the country’s western highveld. From the road, its gentle contours had seemed as alluring as ever. Yet two hours later I’m defeated, having slogged up a rugged trail to what I thought was a summit, only to discover that a vast toast-rack panorama of much more daunting peaks stretches away to the horizon. Somehow the place had shrunk in my memory. But now, as baboons bark derisively from a ridge to my right and the Malolotja Falls thunder into a forested ravine to my left, it all comes back to me as I slump into the shade of a sugar bush.
Though Swaziland is tiny, its location — straddling the steep gradient between South Africa’s central plateau and Mozambique’s coastal plain — endows it with an unusually broad portfolio of landscapes. Just an hour’s drive takes you abruptly from misty escarpments and pine plantations to cane fields and acacia savannah. This means, in turn, a wealth of wildlife — and not just big game: the blue swallow that zips low across my path in Malolotja, for instance, is among Africa’s rarest birds. It also makes for a baffling climate: the same day can mean torrential downpours in the west and dusty drought in the east.
My quest to find out what’s new takes me next to something extremely old. North of Malolotja, on the scrubby slopes of the Komati valley, I follow a boulder-strewn trail down to Nsangwini rock shelter. Here, discreetly concealed beneath a granite overhang, is a stone-age fresco that archaeologists have long hailed as one of the finest examples of rock art in the region.
