eSwatini Border Crossing Drama & Kruger Night Drive Safari| South Africa, Day 13

Thursday, September 27, 2018
We woke up to the sounds of guinea fowl and turkeys outside of our room, so I ventured out to check them out. Complimentary breakfast was not a common luxury on this trip, so we were definitely happy to dive into the Emafini breakfast buffet where we had toast, yogurt, fruit, juice, coffee, and made-to-order eggs.

Our time in eSwatini had gone pretty splendidly the day before, but we had no idea things were about to take a turn for the worse.  It was a very foggy morning as we drove over to the Malolotja Nature Reserve, one of the country's premier, scenic natural attractions, and we were worried what visibility would be like.

It was foggy, but it kind of added to the atmosphere.

We had stopped at the visitor's center, and they'd given us a map and informed us where we would be able to travel without 4WD. There were limited roads for only 2WD, but we were told that there were a couple of roads we could take to get to viewpoints. It didn't take much driving to realize these were still pretty ambitious roads for only 2WD.

We tried to push on to the viewpoint, but with the roads worsening and ever larger rocks along the path, we kept worrying about getting stuck. We decided to reverse and turn around on the narrow pathway, but the car kept stalling. We thought it might be better to push through going forward until we found a wider spot that might better enable us to turn around. This was more successful, but we found ourselves back at the same spot, and our little Hyundai i10 couldn't make it through. I was literally about to the point where I was considering walking back to try and get help, but with a little more effort, we finally were unstuck. Little did I know that was just the beginning of our eSwatini troubles...

The fog had started to lift as we made our way back out of the park.

Relieved that we had gotten the car unstuck, we headed on to the Ngwenya Border to cross back into South Africa.

We were so close...and then a police officer flagged us down and informed us that Francisco was going 74 km/hour in a 60 km zone. He directed him to walk back to another cruiser. Ever the budding vlogger, I zoomed in to record a short video on this fantastic update. I could hear a couple of guys - cops? - talking outside of the driver side window as I was doing this. As I turned back around in my seat, the first cop that had spoken to Francisco asked me "why did you take picture?" I was taken aback for a moment, and I just responded "to capture the moment" or some BS like that. He told me I should get permission next time. I was shaken up after that, and I really hated that they had a speed trap set right before the border crossing, which left us with a negative impression right when we were ending our time in this country. It was about to get worse before it got better.

We were determined to leave here more successfully than our last country departure when we learned that we had effectively snuck into Lesotho. Pulling up to the border crossing area, we drove through an unmanned gate, parked our car, and went into the Swazi Immigration area. We went up to the windows separately, and we were each asked for our Gate Pass. I said we didn't have one since no one had been at the gate post when we pulled in. My agent was on the phone, so he just distractedly stamped my passport to move me along. Francisco's agent gave him a Gate Pass, but the car registration wasn't filled out and he was marked as a party of '1' since he was at the window solo.

We showed these exit papers to the guy at the next stop. His English wasn't terribly strong, but we worked out that he was saying was we didn't have the right paperwork to be able to leave. I tried asking him directly, "what do we need to do to leave?", and he responded "you can't leave." There was a growing pit of despair in my stomach, and those words were like another blow. He was very nice otherwise, and I have no reason to think that he knew how menacing those words sounded to me in that moment, but I was starting to feel frantic.

We went back over to Immigration and explained the situation, and they redirected us back to the gate agent who hadn't been at their post originally. We headed back over there just for her to literally write in the car registration number and change the total from a party of '1' to '2'. 🙄

Back to Immigration we went for oh, only the THIRD TIME. We attempted to explain our situation, but she didn't seem to be listening, so she just added a second, unnecessary exit stamp to our paper.  In place of the guy who very succinctly told us we couldn't leave, there was now a woman in his place reviewing exit tickets. She was very kind and warmly wished us well on our trip and encouraged us to come back to eSwatini. That was enough to push me over the edge; I could barely nod and manage a tight smile as pulled away before my emotions overwhelmed me and I burst into tears.

Then I realized, we would still need to go through Immigration to enter South Africa. We went in the building and joined a narrow, looping queue where more than a couple folks awkwardly squeezed by to "reclaim" their place in line. When it was finally my turn at the window to pass through my documentation and use the fingerprint scanner, the machine refused to work for me. I got it to read my thumbs, but it wouldn't read my left four fingers. The attendant thought maybe it was because my hands were wet; while they felt fairly dry to me, I wiped them on my pants a few times to no avail. Francisco came to assist and was literally pushing down on my fingers to try and get the scanner to read them. He thought the screen might be dirty, so he asked her for a napkin to wipe it down with. It never did end up working, but she eventually just let me go.

We were supposed to go to the Jane Goodall Institute Chimpanzee Eden, but everything had ended up taking much, much longer than we'd anticipated, and we had to make sure there was enough time to make it through the Main Gate and to Skukuza Camp before the roads closed at Kruger National Park. At least now we had more time for lunch!

We started with pizza, Donut Dippers, and a cheese & garlic Bread Ripper from Debonairs Pizza, a South African-based pizza restaurant chain franchise.

We ran into the Pick N Pay for some essentials.

And got a Lemon Meringue Milkyshake from Milky Lane. Their menu looked so amazing, we definitely made sure to return here again!

Finally, it was time to pull into Kruger! Kruger National Park is one of the largest game reserves in Africa. All the big five game animals are found at Kruger National Park, which has more species of large mammals than any other African game reserve. The Phabeni Gate is the closest gate to the town of Hazyview, and Skukuza Rest Camp can be accessed from here. You will be fined for getting to the gate after closing time, so we were really just driving directly to our camp to get checked in.

Our site-seeing was a bit rushed, but there were still a fair amount of animals to be spotted along the way.

We got checked in at the camp and went to drop our stuff off at our bungalow.

The bungalows were old but functional. It smelled like moth balls, and we weren't sure if this was the smell of the material that our bungalow was constructed of or perhaps a chemical used to treat the materials. Inside, the lighting was rather poor, and our twin beds didn't look quite inviting.Water just poured out of the shower in a steady, hard stream, and I didn't realize until I found the shower head resting on top of the shower wall that this missing piece was what was causing that issue.  There was an outdoor kitchen area, although there was a warning sign on the door about monkeys and baboons. All that to say, it wasn't a luxury camp experience, but it was all we needed, and we didn't have any issues with our stay - it even had air conditioning.

With a few minutes left for us to catch the sunset, we actually headed back into the park to get a better view of that gorgeous African sun.

And then one of those magical moments happened where I finally saw my first giraffe! I was actually getting concerned that we weren't going to spot any and wasn't sure how common they were in the areas we'd visited, but they turned out to be the first of many.

We had a little bit of downtime before our Night Safari would begin, so we went back to our bungalow and our outside wall had several pale lizards on it.

Our night drive began at 8:00 PM and lasted about two hours.

The moon was a really spooky red color tonight

To be honest, all of our photos basically suck as we're still not good at night shots. Subscribe to my YouTube channel and check out my South Africa Playlist for better footage. 

We did spot a couple of African civets

 and hyenas!

Here is the Night Safari video:

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