As I type this it is 12am Friday morning and we are en route to Mozambique after a crazy day in Swaziland. We knew going into Thursday that it would be by far our busiest day, and boy were we right. All of us definitely got our exercise in today. We started (as usual) at the butt crack of dawn, 6:30 am wake up in order to leave for breakfast by 7. But getting to breakfast from our rondawels involved a decent 15 min hike through the safari park to the rest stop/restaurant in the middle. We saw plenty of zebras and wildabeast grazing while the sun was coming up over the Swazi mountains, which are now pretty common place. I never thought I would get used to seeing zebras.
Immediately following breakfast we left for our horseback tour of the game park. Thank goodness I opted for the beginner horse group since I haven't ridden for probably a decade. We got to have a nice relaxing walk through the savanna. My horse was named Lizzy, and she was pretty stubborn but still knew exactly what to do without me doing much. She only spooked once, mostly because the guide horse up front was super skiddish and she got freaked, but I held on for dear life and pulled her back pretty quick. Afterward my knees were so stiff I couldn't unbend them for a while and had a hard time walking straight. I'm getting so old...
After a rather uncomfortable hike back down to our rondawels we packed up, made some lunch, and then got cornered by an ostrich. Yes, really, this is my life. Briana and I were in our hut, which has a split farm house-like door, when Julia from next door came running into our room. Apparently she was on her way to the communal bathroom but there was a giganto ostrich in the way. Then the ostrich kind of followed her and came to check out our room, and all of a sudden we see an ostrich head pop up over the bottom half of the door. We filmed the encounter, which was pretty entertaining as long as it didn't try to get in. Then while I kept it occupied at the door Julia hopped out the window and scurried to the bathroom. The stupid ostrich didn't leave for a good 15 mintues, when she finally decided to move on to harassing the girls next door. The wildlife here is insane, though I would take an ostrich over baboons any day, those things are crazy.
After our hike back to the restaurant half of the group--the nervous group, myself included--left to go caving through a nearby mountain. We drove for about 45 minutes and hiked for another 45 in full jumpsuits and helmets. At the time it was pretty brutal, but we had no idea what was to come besides crawling through a cave. Though I wouldn't really call it a proper cave, it was more like a bunch of large granite boulders that were stacked all over the place for miles and miles, and we had to crawl up, down, and through them. It was without question the most intense rock climbing I have ever done. The hardest part was the first hole to get into the cave, called the Key Hole. It was about 3 ft high by 1 ft wide, and we had to go in feet first, wedge our whole bodies between the rocks while the bottom fell out and shimmy our asses down 3 ft until we hit ground. Let me just say wedgie of the century. But we had been told that was the smallest passage--that is except for the tunnel.
Goose had told us about the tunnel, saying it was about the length of the bus and about 2 ft wide by 1 ft high. He recounted that you army crawl through all of it and wedge yourself over a rock akwardly in the middle, somehow flipping your body around in the process. So we were thinking this was going to get really ugly and claustrophobic, but we still opted to try it. And I guess by try it I mean do it since there really isn't another option once you get down there. We got held up as one or two girls freaked out or got wedged in there funny, but it was really only 2 tight spots and a larger tunnel in the middle. Probably no more than 10 ft long which was kind of a let down, but Goose's exagerations have made everything scary we've tried seem way less terrifying once we get down to it.
The guides were really helpful in telling us where to put our feet, how to turn our bodies to fit through crevases, pulling us up ledges. I tried to stick in the back with one guide named Wandile who reminded me of a grown up Thobane from back in Cape Town. Wandile was one of the nicest people I have met so far, and was super eager to help us. At every tricky spot I would stop and ask him how to get through or jump down or climb up, and more often than not he would climb down and tell me to step on his knee or even lowered my feet down with his hands. Thank goodness for Wandile.
Another advantage of sticking in the back was all the girls going through ahead could scare away the spiders. Apparently some "arachnid, not a spider" (according to our group leader) is endemic to these caves. Something about them not having a head and thorax combo made them "not a spider", but I saw two on my way up and let me tell you it was a freaking spider. I could get through the small spaces, around the giant cravases, and shimmy up the boulders, but I did NOT want to be down there with those spiders. But besides those there were plenty of bats hanging from the ceiling which I thought was pretty awesome. Since it's winter they were all in a state called torpor, which is kind of like a cold hibernation for them except they can wake up. So whenever walking through a bat area we had to be super quiet, but I think we still woke a couple because I saw some flying around all pissed off. There was one hanging on a wall all by himself that the guides had named Jeffery because he is a Jeffery's Horseshoe bat, then at the end we saw another one all alone on the wall that they called Jeffery's brother. Loved the bats.
To finish off the crazy, jam-packed day we hiked back down from the caves in the dark and went to the nearby geothermal hotsprings. These pools are called the cuddle puddles by nearly everyone, and I'm sure you can guess why... Luckilly we were at a private hotspring where there was less cohorting, and there our group of nervous nellies got to eat copious amounts of pizza and beer all from in the 100 degree pool. We all agreed that this was one of the best nights yet. The second group of not so nervous ones went in the cave after us and didn't show up to the hotsprings for hours. By the time they arrived and were eating I was the pruniest I have ever been, but so relaxed. I think I spent a total of about 4 hours in the hotsprings, and hopefully that means we'll be a lot less sore tomorrow. But probably not.
Having just left the hotsprings we are now crashed out on the bus for an overnight trip to Mozambique. We have to first stop at the border out of Swaziland and the border into Mozambique, which will hopefully go smoothly since we prearranged for visas. Our program somehow managed to negotiate the visa fee down from 600 Rand to only 300, and we had to fill out our apps and turn in our passports to the embassy bright and early this morning. But supposedly this will save us about 6 hours at the border and keep us from being interrogated individually in Portuguese by border patrol. Go figure why Mozambique is so intense, it's a pretty third world country and I feel like not a lot of people are dying to get into it. I'm guessing the gov isn't the best, though I know nothing about it. Regardless we should be in Tofo in about 10 hours, which after our all day adventures I will hopefully sleep all the way through.
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