Swaziland fauna

Swaziland was a British protectorate from 1906 to 1968 and so, like Lesotho, was never part of the mad South African experiment in social engineering. Swaziland is an absolute monarchy, and the tourist posters and souvenir shops make much of the Umhlanga festival, when twenty thousand young women parade in front of King Mswati III so he can pick one of them out as new wife - to be fair, Mswati doesn't always insist on this perk, and has only chosen thirteen wives so far. His predecessor got to seventy. I noticed in the literature that King Mswati III was educated at Sherbourne College in Dorset, UK, just down the road from where I went to school - I have to wonder what his fellow schoolboys thought of his amorous future.

The north-west part of Swaziland, where we went, is over 1,200 metres. On Saturday the temperature was 25 degrees and extremely humid - walking was a sweaty effort - but when we woke up on Sunday morning it was 12 degrees and very misty - so misty in fact that the staff at Malolotja Nature Reserve, which we were planning to visit, advised us not to bother. Driving down from the hills in the fog, with ranks of fir trees barely visible along the side of the road, felt more like coming away from a European ski resort than leaving an African kingdom in the summer (the only difference was the stray cows in the middle of the road). Is Africa hot? Well southern Africa, at least, is nothing like Calabria in the middle of August, in my experience.

Above: orange millipede; zebra millipede; UFO spider (I'm making these names up - a cousin of this UFO spider hitched a ride on the back of my car all the way to Joburg - he's still there, spinning webs around the rear number plate); large moth (four inches across); female Cape Weaver busy destroying a nest just patiently built by a male (this is part of the mating process - males build nests, a female comes along and rips up the ones she doesn't like and accepts the male who built a good nest in which she'll feel confident about laying her eggs. This seems wasteful, but on the other hand you don't want your eggs falling out when there's a bit of wind); and few feathers on a good old classic peacock - yes there are African peacocks too.