All Hail the Chief (or how I ended up being a chauffeur in Swaziland) Part 2

In case you missed the first installment of this blog, here is the link.
https://runnerquest.blogspot.com/2018/02/all-hail-chief-or-how-i-ended-up-being.html

“So I know a great hotel” says the Swazi Chief.  “This hotel has covered private parking.  If you are driving a car with plates from Gauteng Province in South Africa, you don’t want your car sitting outside.”  So after a brief detour to visit another one of his four sisters, we head to the Park Hotel in Manzini.
True to his word, after a few twists and turns we were in the underground parking of the hotel.  After slogging up 2 flights of stairs with our luggage we arrived at reception.  I should have known we were in trouble when the receptionist flipped a few pages on her clipboard to locate a grid and took a pencil and made an X on two rooms.  I invite you to go on Trip Advisor and read the 9 reviews for this gem of a hotel.  TA does indicate that online booking is not available.  THAT IS BECAUSE THEY DO NOT HAVE A COMPUTER!  Ntombi, the Chief and I slog up a couple more flights of stairs and locate our rooms.  I quickly locate the window unit, crank up the AC and start shutting all the open windows.  Our luxurious room has a balcony, but unfortunately, the door will not close, much less lock.  After meeting with our Security specialist on the first day in the South Africa office, I have become super paranoid and this non-closing / non-locking balcony door seemed like the perfect set up for Ms. Reception to call her thug friends to come scale the balcony and slit our throats in the middle of the night.  Ntombi heads down to reception to discuss the situation.  She comes back to a key to a new room which we go to inspect.  The first thing I notice after checking to make sure the balcony door closes and locks is that the air conditioner is missing a knob.  I made a mental note to steal the knob off the AC in our old room.  We make the room switch and try to get some sleep so we are well rested for our big day of sightseeing.

Unfortunately, the AC does not work well in this room so we toss and turn all night until we finally get up at 6am.  Ntombi heads to the shower first.  Now when you are paying $35USD for a hotel room it is probably a bit too much to ask for all of your doors to lock AND for the shower to work.  This is how we found ourselves hunched over the tub faucet splashing our bits and pieces while trying to wash up with the random bar of soap we found laying on the bathroom counter (see photo of soap in trip adviser photos).  There we find ourselves at 6:30am all dressed up with no place to go.  Ntombi marches to the Chiefs room to instruct him that we will be leaving at 7:00am.  She knocks and bangs on his door but the Chief is nowhere to be found.  She ventures down to the lobby and finds the Chief sitting there in full Swazi regalia.  When she finally gets back to the room I am in a near state of panic.  Every time she is gone for more than 15 minutes I am convinced that she has been kidnapped (Thanks, Chris, the security specialist).  We pile into the car around 7:30 to begin our big day of sightseeing.
Swaziland is a beautiful country.  It reminds me a lot of Scotland with the beautiful green mountains and rolling hills.  One thing I learned is that Swaziland has one cell carrier.  When you enter Swaziland, if you don’t have MTN cell service, you go into a dead zone.  We had no way to google anything, Waze up some maps, nothing.  In this respect, we were very lucky we had the Chief with us.  He was our human GPS.  He knew exactly where everything was.  Granted many times his directions included “Go up” and “Go down” or “At the stop sign turn. . . .”  when I had no stop sign, but he got us where we needed to go.
Sightseeing in Swazi was a mixed bag.  We went to a safari park where they had about 10 animals.  We did see some cute warthogs laying by the fire in the camp getting warmed up.  We went to the Memorial Park but it was closed with a big lock on the doors.  We went to the Swaziland museum but the employee at the museum basically talked us out of paying the entrance fee.  I will admit, the one display case I could see from the entrance looked pretty sparse.  We did go to the Swazi Cultural Village.  Normally I tend to avoid these kind of things because I think they are a tourist trap and are just going to try to sell me a bunch of stuff made in China.  This one was really cool!  We started with  a traditional song and dance performance then went on a tour of the grounds that had traditional huts. Our guide explained to us where the different wives would live and the mother in law.  We saw the Swazi version of the “man cave” - the cow enclosure and how the women would have to bow and lay the food at the entrance of the close since women are subservient and are not allowed in the man cave.  This reinforced the impression we had gotten from the Chief.  We visited a couple of craft markets and met some lovely Swazi people.  Night 2 was at a much nicer hotel with working air conditioning and a buffet dinner.
The trip back Sunday was uneventful.  We took a different border entry back to Swaziland which was about an hour shorter (we didn’t have to detour to the Cheif’s home for him to get his iPad like we did on Friday.)  The crazy thing was about 1/2 mile after crossing into South Africa, the pavement ended and we ended up driving on a dirt highway for about 45 minutes.  They had signs and everything, just like a real highway, just no pavement.
We dropped the Chief off at his rental and went back to Ntombi’s sister to tell her about our hilarious adventure.
We never did get to the Palace in Swaziland.  Our Chief slightly exaggerated his position.  it seems the real connection to the Palace was through his sister who is a nurse for the 14 wives.  She informed Ntombi that there are no guests received on the weekend.  Oh, well, I have a cute olive bowl now!
I had a wonderful time on my Swaziland adventure.  I have a cute Christmas tree ornament to remember the trip by and Ntombi’s sister made me a beautiful skirt that I cannot wait to wear this spring.
Sorry for the lack of photos in this blog, but I am writing it on my iPad and can’t seem to access my photo gallery. So this is how I ended up being a chauffeur in Swaziland!