Mlilwane

I went to Swaziland again at the weekend and stayed in the "rest camp" in the Mlilwane game reserve - which claims to be the oldest reserve in the Kingdom. Many of the wild animals in the reserve have certainly got used to humans - the camp is unfenced and warthogs, impala, zebra, ostriches, monkeys and guinea fowl all wander in and around in a very relaxed manner. The cabins are made of thin planks of woods so it's quite possible to be woken up in the middle of the night by a duiker (a small antelope) coughing next to your head - a strange sound half way between a cough and a dry heave. The restaurant has a veranda next to a murky green lake much visited by ibis, egrets and herons - a tree has been sunk next to the railing to stop guests leaning out to feed the crocodiles - I though this was a joke at first, then a waiter threw some bread over the railing to prove his point - there was a roiling of fish and then sure enough a small croc shot out from under the veranda and chomped very fast on something - a fish sandwich maybe.

There are no lions or leopards in Mlilwane (they say) so it's considered safe to walk or rent a bicycle to get around, which is very pleasant compared to the standard game reserve experience of being thrown around on a land rover for hours on end. However, there are hippos in the reserve, and they're responsible for most of the human fatalities in Africa - the advice, if a hippo faces you and seems to be working up to a charge, is to get behind a tree, even a small one - hippos are very myopic and they can't jump, so they only tend to charge across flat land - if they can still see you. What you should do if there aren't any trees around isn't clear; although perhaps the Mlilwane hippos are so used to human visitors that they can't be bothered to charge them any more. Anyway, I didn't see any hippos at all - and I managed not to fall into the lake while slipping bread to the crocodiles; so here I still am.

Above: ostrich at the camp fire; vervet monkeys on a wall; the murky lake (note the egrets in the tree - the white dots); a blue duiker; a warthog - they often get down on their knees to graze, which seems to be a fairly serious design flaw - why don't they have longer necks? or shorter legs, for that matter.