Sunday, September 27, 2009

September 20, 2009 - Swazi Culture

In the morning, we visited the Swazi Cultural Village at Mantenga. On the way we walked through a crafts market and visited the waterfall behind the village. Despite our detours, we think we arrived at the village too early as locals were still sleeping (and loudly snoring) in their beehive huts and everyone but our guide was wearing western clothes! We waited to watch the traditional Swazi dance performance, which was very entertaining. We did not join the official tour, which was more staged (i.e. people wearing traditional clothes, and not sleeping!!).






































































































































After lunch, we went for a hike up Sheeba's Breast mountain. The hike was extremely steep at some points, making it especially difficult and dangerous to come down, but the views from the top were simply magnificent. With aching knees and still heavily breathing, we came upon a local man who appeared at first to be dead, but who then started singing to himself while he lied down barefoot on a giant rock.
















































































Later on, we went to the Cuddle Puddle, only to realize that it was not an actual hot spring but rather a pool full of guys. The indiens were all checking out Gen even before she put on a bathing suit, so we quickly decided we weren't joining the sausage party! We still stayed there for a bit to watch the people as it seemed like it was a pretty popular hang for local youth.












We went to dinner at Quatermain's pub and had two gigantic steaks with Swazi sweet wine! Yumm!

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