LeonDude
Bachelor Dog
- Joined
- Sep 26, 2007
- Messages
- 10,293
- Reaction score
- 317
- Location
- Gauteng - Centurion
- Bike
- Suzuki DR650
Sawubona Swaziland!
First impressions of a country are always important, and what better place to get that first impression than at the border post. We went in at Bulembo border post, the one lying between Barberton and Pigs Peak.
In took about 20 minutes to clear the SA side, and Swaziland beat that by 10 minutes and got us into Swaziland in about 10 minutes flat. And that includes paying R50 each for road tax.
Friendly and efficient, that was my first impression of the people of Swaziland.
Here I am going to interrupt myself to tell you about the road that runs from Barberton to the border post though. The tight twisties rise up and up into the clouds, with views over South Africa that make you want to linger a bit. But the border closes at 16:00, so we push on.
The border between South Africa and Swaziland. What a stunning piece of land, South Africa on the right, Swaziland on the left.
Ok, so now we have seen the border post and the people are friendly, but what about the country? Well the roads for one thing are not in a good condition. It is obvious that the rains have caused some serious damage, and riding is slow into Pigs Peak. We meet a rider and his lady on their bikes coming from the front, he tells us that the road is only bad up to the point where we are standing, from there the rest of the roads in the country are great. I find it difficult to believe, but the truth is that the road is absolutely fantastic to ride. A newbie on a big DS bike might struggle a bit, but we were enjoying the road, it had KLR650 written all over it, in capital letters. This lasted all the way to Pigs Peak, and from there it was tar again.
Check out this electricity cable pole.
Because of time constraints (we had gone to the Ramstein concert the night before) we had only left on Saturday morning, and trailered our bikes to Barberton, not knowing if we would make the border post which closes at four in the afternoon. This meant that we had not booked accommodation, and now had to look for a place to stay.
We followed some boards to a lodge, and turned off the tar with four kilos of dirt to do. Cave Girl was in the lead, and on one very steep downhill there was a vehicle coming from the front. A moment of indecision later saw the inevitable happen, and the bike slipped from under her.
Now I was standing behind her, but also on the downhill with nowhere to safely put my side stand out. To my relief she immediately hit the kill switch and moments later stood up. The vehicle for which she had stopped was still coming up towards us, leaving me with no option but to take out my camera and take a picture >
.
I then rode my bike to where I could park it, before walking back to CG. The gents in the bakkie had picked up her bike, and was amazed to see me ride away, thinking I was going to leave here there! Thankfully, this was to be our only side stand incident of the trip.
The lodge we found was quite expensive, but that is the price you pay for not doing your homework. Some people might have objected to some of the shortcomings of the place, but we were only too glad to find a place to put our heads down, and there was nothing wrong that was a train smash. The place boasts a spectacular range of waterfalls, a large area that people can hike in and everything was clean and neat. For supper we ordered traditional Swazi chicken and the food was great, even though we had to drink Castle because they did not have what we most wanted to taste, the traditional Swazi beer.
The owner not only took the time to chat to us over dinner, he also helped us with finding a few nice routes to ride the next day, and made sure he was there with a map to help us the next morning.
The owner having a chat with CG
Next morning, after a stroll around the gardens and then a solid breakfast we departed for our next destination, Siteki.
The ride started with a bit of fun on dirt to get back to the tar road, then a bit of losing our way in the village, then a bit more tar until the tar ran out and we were on gravel again. This time the gravel was in good to excellent condition, with only a few bad patches where recent flood damage had not been fixed yet. It was tight twisties up and down the mountains, into and out of patches of mist, 650s’ purring through one mountain village after the other.
Everywhere we went the people were more than friendly as we waved to them and they waved back. What struck me on this ride was that I could see no shacks. Small houses yes, and very little sign of rich people, but these people were proud of their houses, and house and gardens were neat and well kept.
It was also becoming clear that Swaziland, or at least the part we were riding through, was very scarcely populated.
Cave Girl lives in an area called Croyden, and when she found out there was a place called Croyden on our ride we just had to find the board and take a photograph. Oops I haven’t got that one, will wait for CG to post.
And now would be a good time to mention what had happened to the route I had planned on Mapsource. Firstly my GPS had thrown all its’ toys and refused to load the maps, so the routes were useless. All I could do was load the waypoints, and the GPS would draw a straight line from where I was to where I wanted to be. This meant that we had to use CGs’ GPS, and this would have worked if we had not kept on looking at maps and seeing interesting places and roads, making us ignore the routes I had planned and going off on a completely unplanned journey in a foreign land.
My GPS was recording our ride though.
On this scale you probably won’t be able to see all the U – turns we made trying to find different places, but it was a lot more fun than just following the route we had planned. I love reccie rides!
At one stage we entered a wildlife conservation area, but there was no booms or guards or fences or anything, we simply turned off the tar road and hit a dirt road! Here we saw Kudu feasting on the newly ripened Maroela, and after scaring the herd I also saw some warthog. We also found Zebra and an Impala, and some other buck that disappeared to quick for me to identify.
At around lunchtime we also found this huge old Maroela, and poached ourselves a GundaChino and Lemon creams for lunch.
Shortly after this we came to a bridge where the water was flowing over the bridge. Remembering how I had given my bike a bath in Die Hel I decided against doing the water crossing, but Cave Girl insisted we go through. After walking the crossing I agreed that we could go through as long as we took the bikes through with both of us holding on to the bikes. The water was flowing strong, but we managed without incident.
After the nature conservancy we found mile upon mile of sugar cane. The dirt roads through the sugar cane farms were in great condition and well maintained, and we made good time even though we were now following our noses to figure out where we were. The Lebombo Mountains were ahead of us, and as soon as we got to them the road turned south towards Siteki village.
We again went through a Nature reserve, and inside this reserve we were stopped by traffic officers. They had a quick look to see if our drivers’ licenses and the bikes licenses were in order and waved us on. Take note though, the speed limit in the nature reserve is sixty, and I was sticking to it, otherwise things might have been more expensive.
At Siteki we again changed our plans and decided to sleep at the Siteki hotel instead of where we had first planned to stay, simply because the hotel had a restaurant and a bar. Typical bikers, looking after the food and drink.
Siteki hotel came as a surprise. The whole place has been newly renovated, the service was excellent and the food was not only great tasting but came in large portions too.
At the bar we found it at last, the long lost Swazi beer called Sibembe. I can’t remember exactly how many they started off with, but when we left the hotel the next morning they had no more Sibembe, we had taken the whole lot. Those that weren’t inside our bloodstream or already in the toilet was in the luggage, on its’ way to South Africa.
For those of you thinking of going to have a look at Swaziland, I can really recommend Siteki hotel in Siteki village. Make a booking though, as I think we might have been lucky to find a room open that night, as the breakfast buffet the next morning was quite busy. Also, drinking large quantities of Sibembe is lots of fun!
From Siteki it was to be tar all the way to Ngwenya, where we visited what is said to be the oldest Iron Ore mine ever found. Here we had our only bad experience when the person there tried to rip us off, and I nearly ripped his head off.
There are nobody at the entrance gate, and the one person who came to us wore no uniform. He then wanted something like twenty eight rand because we had parked there. I basically told him to go get stuffed, and we left the Iron ore mine with a bad taste in the mouth. We did bring you some pics of the place though. Even if it is the oldest Iron Ore mine in the world, it was obviously still mined until quite recently.
From there it was a short hop to the border, where the Swazi side was once again a quick affair. Once we got to the SA side things just went sour again. I cannot believe that people can go through their lives with such sour attitudes as the immigration and SARS people who work behind those counters at the border post. But I might start a separate thread about that at some stage, no need for them in my ride report.
So through into South Africa and it takes us a few minutes to find the road that we are looking for, but by now the two of us are used to the fact that the roads change often in forest areas and we quickly find the road, and what a road it was. It starts off easy enough, and we find that from the South Africa side we can still see the Ngwenya mine.
Then the road becomes twisty, and slowly starts going higher and higher. We stop at a waterfall for photos, and when we get to the nature reserve the boom gate operator asks no question, he simply lifts the boom when he sees us. Great stuff! Please guys if you ride through there, keep the speed low so they will always welcome us.
The ride through the natural forests in the mountains is fantastic, it is an experience that I rarely get to have.
On the other side of the reserve things are not looking so good for the knobbly brigade though, they are busy tarring the road!
Before they can tar it the two of us get a chance to ride it though, and the road just winds higher and higher, up and up into the mountains, towards the Josefsdal border post where we had entered Swaziland two days ago. Here the road meets the tar road that we had been on then, and now it is downhill on the tar twisties. At some stage CG takes over the lead, and she picks up the speed and keeps me on my toes all the way into Barberton, where the trailer is waiting to take the bikes home.
In closing, I have to thank a couple of people. Firstly ChrissieB, for her great – as – always hospitality and allowing us to store our stuff with her for the weekend. Remember guys, if you need a place to stay in Barberton, the Gold Nugget is biker friendly. And someone please take her some Wild Dog stickers for her bike!
Also to Blazes, who gave us a lot of info for this ride, thanks!
And a special thanks to the Swazi people, who treated us with smiles and warm welcomes wherever we went – Sizobonana!
And of course to Cave Girl, thanks for a great weekend!
Take care guys, we will see you on the roads!
First impressions of a country are always important, and what better place to get that first impression than at the border post. We went in at Bulembo border post, the one lying between Barberton and Pigs Peak.
In took about 20 minutes to clear the SA side, and Swaziland beat that by 10 minutes and got us into Swaziland in about 10 minutes flat. And that includes paying R50 each for road tax.
Friendly and efficient, that was my first impression of the people of Swaziland.
Here I am going to interrupt myself to tell you about the road that runs from Barberton to the border post though. The tight twisties rise up and up into the clouds, with views over South Africa that make you want to linger a bit. But the border closes at 16:00, so we push on.
The border between South Africa and Swaziland. What a stunning piece of land, South Africa on the right, Swaziland on the left.
Ok, so now we have seen the border post and the people are friendly, but what about the country? Well the roads for one thing are not in a good condition. It is obvious that the rains have caused some serious damage, and riding is slow into Pigs Peak. We meet a rider and his lady on their bikes coming from the front, he tells us that the road is only bad up to the point where we are standing, from there the rest of the roads in the country are great. I find it difficult to believe, but the truth is that the road is absolutely fantastic to ride. A newbie on a big DS bike might struggle a bit, but we were enjoying the road, it had KLR650 written all over it, in capital letters. This lasted all the way to Pigs Peak, and from there it was tar again.
Check out this electricity cable pole.
Because of time constraints (we had gone to the Ramstein concert the night before) we had only left on Saturday morning, and trailered our bikes to Barberton, not knowing if we would make the border post which closes at four in the afternoon. This meant that we had not booked accommodation, and now had to look for a place to stay.
We followed some boards to a lodge, and turned off the tar with four kilos of dirt to do. Cave Girl was in the lead, and on one very steep downhill there was a vehicle coming from the front. A moment of indecision later saw the inevitable happen, and the bike slipped from under her.
Now I was standing behind her, but also on the downhill with nowhere to safely put my side stand out. To my relief she immediately hit the kill switch and moments later stood up. The vehicle for which she had stopped was still coming up towards us, leaving me with no option but to take out my camera and take a picture >
.
I then rode my bike to where I could park it, before walking back to CG. The gents in the bakkie had picked up her bike, and was amazed to see me ride away, thinking I was going to leave here there! Thankfully, this was to be our only side stand incident of the trip.
The lodge we found was quite expensive, but that is the price you pay for not doing your homework. Some people might have objected to some of the shortcomings of the place, but we were only too glad to find a place to put our heads down, and there was nothing wrong that was a train smash. The place boasts a spectacular range of waterfalls, a large area that people can hike in and everything was clean and neat. For supper we ordered traditional Swazi chicken and the food was great, even though we had to drink Castle because they did not have what we most wanted to taste, the traditional Swazi beer.
The owner not only took the time to chat to us over dinner, he also helped us with finding a few nice routes to ride the next day, and made sure he was there with a map to help us the next morning.
The owner having a chat with CG
Next morning, after a stroll around the gardens and then a solid breakfast we departed for our next destination, Siteki.
The ride started with a bit of fun on dirt to get back to the tar road, then a bit of losing our way in the village, then a bit more tar until the tar ran out and we were on gravel again. This time the gravel was in good to excellent condition, with only a few bad patches where recent flood damage had not been fixed yet. It was tight twisties up and down the mountains, into and out of patches of mist, 650s’ purring through one mountain village after the other.
Everywhere we went the people were more than friendly as we waved to them and they waved back. What struck me on this ride was that I could see no shacks. Small houses yes, and very little sign of rich people, but these people were proud of their houses, and house and gardens were neat and well kept.
It was also becoming clear that Swaziland, or at least the part we were riding through, was very scarcely populated.
Cave Girl lives in an area called Croyden, and when she found out there was a place called Croyden on our ride we just had to find the board and take a photograph. Oops I haven’t got that one, will wait for CG to post.
And now would be a good time to mention what had happened to the route I had planned on Mapsource. Firstly my GPS had thrown all its’ toys and refused to load the maps, so the routes were useless. All I could do was load the waypoints, and the GPS would draw a straight line from where I was to where I wanted to be. This meant that we had to use CGs’ GPS, and this would have worked if we had not kept on looking at maps and seeing interesting places and roads, making us ignore the routes I had planned and going off on a completely unplanned journey in a foreign land.
My GPS was recording our ride though.
On this scale you probably won’t be able to see all the U – turns we made trying to find different places, but it was a lot more fun than just following the route we had planned. I love reccie rides!
At one stage we entered a wildlife conservation area, but there was no booms or guards or fences or anything, we simply turned off the tar road and hit a dirt road! Here we saw Kudu feasting on the newly ripened Maroela, and after scaring the herd I also saw some warthog. We also found Zebra and an Impala, and some other buck that disappeared to quick for me to identify.
At around lunchtime we also found this huge old Maroela, and poached ourselves a GundaChino and Lemon creams for lunch.
Shortly after this we came to a bridge where the water was flowing over the bridge. Remembering how I had given my bike a bath in Die Hel I decided against doing the water crossing, but Cave Girl insisted we go through. After walking the crossing I agreed that we could go through as long as we took the bikes through with both of us holding on to the bikes. The water was flowing strong, but we managed without incident.
After the nature conservancy we found mile upon mile of sugar cane. The dirt roads through the sugar cane farms were in great condition and well maintained, and we made good time even though we were now following our noses to figure out where we were. The Lebombo Mountains were ahead of us, and as soon as we got to them the road turned south towards Siteki village.
We again went through a Nature reserve, and inside this reserve we were stopped by traffic officers. They had a quick look to see if our drivers’ licenses and the bikes licenses were in order and waved us on. Take note though, the speed limit in the nature reserve is sixty, and I was sticking to it, otherwise things might have been more expensive.
At Siteki we again changed our plans and decided to sleep at the Siteki hotel instead of where we had first planned to stay, simply because the hotel had a restaurant and a bar. Typical bikers, looking after the food and drink.
Siteki hotel came as a surprise. The whole place has been newly renovated, the service was excellent and the food was not only great tasting but came in large portions too.
At the bar we found it at last, the long lost Swazi beer called Sibembe. I can’t remember exactly how many they started off with, but when we left the hotel the next morning they had no more Sibembe, we had taken the whole lot. Those that weren’t inside our bloodstream or already in the toilet was in the luggage, on its’ way to South Africa.
For those of you thinking of going to have a look at Swaziland, I can really recommend Siteki hotel in Siteki village. Make a booking though, as I think we might have been lucky to find a room open that night, as the breakfast buffet the next morning was quite busy. Also, drinking large quantities of Sibembe is lots of fun!
From Siteki it was to be tar all the way to Ngwenya, where we visited what is said to be the oldest Iron Ore mine ever found. Here we had our only bad experience when the person there tried to rip us off, and I nearly ripped his head off.
There are nobody at the entrance gate, and the one person who came to us wore no uniform. He then wanted something like twenty eight rand because we had parked there. I basically told him to go get stuffed, and we left the Iron ore mine with a bad taste in the mouth. We did bring you some pics of the place though. Even if it is the oldest Iron Ore mine in the world, it was obviously still mined until quite recently.
From there it was a short hop to the border, where the Swazi side was once again a quick affair. Once we got to the SA side things just went sour again. I cannot believe that people can go through their lives with such sour attitudes as the immigration and SARS people who work behind those counters at the border post. But I might start a separate thread about that at some stage, no need for them in my ride report.
So through into South Africa and it takes us a few minutes to find the road that we are looking for, but by now the two of us are used to the fact that the roads change often in forest areas and we quickly find the road, and what a road it was. It starts off easy enough, and we find that from the South Africa side we can still see the Ngwenya mine.
Then the road becomes twisty, and slowly starts going higher and higher. We stop at a waterfall for photos, and when we get to the nature reserve the boom gate operator asks no question, he simply lifts the boom when he sees us. Great stuff! Please guys if you ride through there, keep the speed low so they will always welcome us.
The ride through the natural forests in the mountains is fantastic, it is an experience that I rarely get to have.
On the other side of the reserve things are not looking so good for the knobbly brigade though, they are busy tarring the road!
Before they can tar it the two of us get a chance to ride it though, and the road just winds higher and higher, up and up into the mountains, towards the Josefsdal border post where we had entered Swaziland two days ago. Here the road meets the tar road that we had been on then, and now it is downhill on the tar twisties. At some stage CG takes over the lead, and she picks up the speed and keeps me on my toes all the way into Barberton, where the trailer is waiting to take the bikes home.
In closing, I have to thank a couple of people. Firstly ChrissieB, for her great – as – always hospitality and allowing us to store our stuff with her for the weekend. Remember guys, if you need a place to stay in Barberton, the Gold Nugget is biker friendly. And someone please take her some Wild Dog stickers for her bike!
Also to Blazes, who gave us a lot of info for this ride, thanks!
And a special thanks to the Swazi people, who treated us with smiles and warm welcomes wherever we went – Sizobonana!
And of course to Cave Girl, thanks for a great weekend!
Take care guys, we will see you on the roads!
