This morning was hazier than yesterday. We are so grateful to our Lord for the amazing day He gave us yesterday.

We packed up and were able to leave by about 9am, with enough time to stop by the Royal Natal National Park Visitor Center on our way out. It is a nice large building. About the only thing of interest inside was the 8 foot by 6 foot relief map of the park. This map used to be located in the Tendele Camp office. The rest of the building had a rather limited supply of curios and groceries for sale. We think the Tendele Camp office, though much smaller, had a greater selection.

Our first stop was at Bergville for the only petrol stop of our trip. Next we stopped again at Dundee Boulevard for a restroom break. Like most malls here, there are security guards watching the customer’s vehicles. What was different about the guard this time was he was an elderly white man that spoke English very clearly. When he learned we were from Swaziland, he asked if we were farmers! When he noticed that Virginia was slow getting out of the car (still recovering from the hike yesterday), he said there was special parking reserved for the disabled. We laughed and said thanks for his concern. We wondered if he was a former, or retired, farmer himself, but didn’t get a chance to ask. We did not see him when we got back to the car.

We were using the GPS and maps saved in my smart phone for the return trip, especially since we were returning via a different route. Unfortunately, we lost the GPS signal just before we got to the anticipated turn in Piet Retief, so we were looking for the road sign towards Mahamba. After progressing through very heavy traffic and as we were leaving the north end of town, I noticed an old faded Houdkop sign pointing to the right. Knowing that Houtkop was the old Afrikaans name for the border gate that we wanted to use, we took that route. All signs after that only mentioned Emahlathini, so we assumed that to be the new name for Houdkop. The first mile was paved. The next 11 miles was an all dirt road that eventually ended up where we wanted to be. It ended up being over 4 miles shorter than the anticipated route. (Reviewing the maps later, the turn that we initially should have made would have been on the south side of Piet Retief, but from Google street view there are no signs for that turn. That’s why we didn’t see it!)

We were able to reestablish GPS contact at the border, but by then we knew the route. The rest of the trip in Eswatini was on fairly new paved road with a few well marked speed bumps. We filled up with petrol in Manzini, and got home shortly after 4pm. Fuel mileage for the Honda Fit Hybrid from Bergville to Manzini worked out to almost 48 miles per gallon (less than 5 liter/100km)

We had one response to the above photo (first shown in an earlier blog). That person said it looked like a dog, that it was bread that got squashed in shipping. Very close to right, except the squashing happened to take place in a self-operated electric bread slicer at the store. The store sells unsliced brown bread for about $0.45 per loaf, so I grabbed a still warm loaf (wanted it the freshest possible) and took it to the slicer. The fellow after me commented that the loaf was too warm. The crust on top sliced normally, but the warm, softer part of the bread got ‘squashed’ by the slicer. Since then we look for the loaves that have cooled down some!