Photo Essay

Last month we went to one of the royal kraals for the beginning of marula season.  Translation:  we hung out in one of the king's palaces/cattle pens while all the gogos rolled up with the first of the season's marula beer.  Marula is the stuff amarula is made out of.  Marula beer does not taste like amarula.  People come from all over the country in their traditional get up and hang out in a cattle pen drinking home brew beer out of old oil canisters until the king shows up, commands them to sing and dance, and then tells them to get drunk.  

It is strangely reminiscent of a renaissance faire.

Casey was the star of the show.  Everybody wanted to hand him drinks out of old oil drums.  We were commanded to take this photo.

Eventually, the gogos all paraded from the palace to the show ground.  We were also commanded to take pictures of that.  So we did.

Beer and grilled meat in a crowded dirt lot -- somehow this felt like a lot of my college experience.

After that weekend, we decided that we needed to spend more of our weekends having fun.  So we went to Kosi Bay, which is a world heritage site on the Indian Ocean, just a teensy bit south of the Mozambique border.  It was about 6 hours from Mbabane, and at a certain point the road stops being paved and starts being...kind of just a lot of potholes.  Punctuated by cows.  But then its fine, because it turns into sand.

But the sand turns into a view that looks like this.  Kosi Bay is a series of lakes leading up to an ocean. Those little fences in the water are fish traps.  The tide comes in, the fish get trapped, and then people can just go and scoop them up.  Its genius.  And it looks really awesome.

     So beautiful.  This is one of the lakes with beautiful green mountain and neat fishing traps.

It takes a 45 minute drive in a 4x4 to get to the beach proper.  My little car was not going to do that, but we had the chance to bump on down there in an old school land rover and hung out for hours.  We had to wade through a series of tide pools holding our picnic supplies above the water line.  It was kind of like Oregon trail...but in a beautiful series of Indian Ocean inlets.  And nobody's oxen drowned. 

Then we braai'ed (barbecued) and toasted s'mores.  I'd like to point out that I built that fire.  Go me.

Bye Kosi Bay!  Go little Rav4 Go!

[Eish!]