we went for a hike

Two weekends ago we joined 5 other PCVs for a hiking/camping trip in Swaziland’s Malalotja Nature Reserve. Finally: a good reason to buy myself a big bush knife.



The trails in Malalotja are pretty well overgrown this time of year (grass up to 9 feet tall), and according to the main entrance registry we were the only people in the whole park. On the first day we walked along open, grassy ridges and hillsides and then descended deep into the rocky gorge of a swift-moving river, reaching our shady little riverside campsite at dusk. We spent the next day exploring the gorge and adjoining valley… just beautiful. At night I spent an inordinate amount of time sharpening my new knife, trying out various types of river stones to see which worked best.


About 1/2 km downriver from our campsite was a 35-foot waterfall, sheer and wide and thunderous in the narrow gorge, spilling into a large pool below. We scampered down the granite slopes to the pool’s edge and swam in and out of the current—not too cold, not too hot. On the opposite side of the waterfall was a bare granite cliff with a rounded, overhanging edge. I swam over to its base and dove beneath the surface to check the pool’s depth: didn’t find the bottom. Perfect—deep enough for some cliff-jumping. So I picked my way back up to the waterfall’s top, swam across a calm little section of river about 10 meters above the falls (by far the most nerve-racking part of this adventure) and made the first jump off the cliff with a couple of friends.

I’ve always been a sucker for jumping into water from cliffs and bridges, and this 35-foot cliff wasn’t high enough to warrant any dread—just big smiles. The real thrill for me was jumping alongside that roaring waterfall. One of the guys who jumped with me is an expert whitewater kayaker. He checked out the water flow in the pool (and in the crossing above the waterfall) and showed me where it was and was not safe to swim… given our remote location, I wouldn’t have done it without his trained eye helping out. Anyway, it was fun (and safe) enough that I did it twice more before leaving.

About 50 meters downriver from that pool was another waterfall, this one about twice as high. But there was no obvious route down to the pool below, so we just peered over the edge and enjoyed the view.

Malalotja is home to a lot of wildlife— plenty of rare African birds and about 63 species of mammals, including baboons, eland, wildebeest and hartebeest, oribi, aardwolf, and even a small herd of elephants (which came in from South Africa some years ago and have apparently bred successfully in one of the park’s larger, more remote valleys). We didn’t see any elephants or leopards, but loud baboon barks were common, echoing off the steep rock walls around our campsite. They sound like dogs, minus the howl. The most common animal we encountered were not welcome: ticks. With the grass so tall and thick it’s tick season here in Swaziland (a handful of PCVs have had to deal with tick-bite fever). So we’d stop pretty frequently to check for ticks and brush them off before they had a chance to bite.

The trails in Malalotja are currently so overgrown that it was a real chore just to stay on them. Bushwhacking was unavoidable. One morning, four of us set out to go see some huge waterfalls a few hours’ hike upriver from camp, but we couldn’t follow the trail. After an hour and a half of traveling we weren’t even 1/4 of the way there: we’d spent most of our time bushwhacking through a broad, bowl-shaped field of high grass and ferns after our trail had disappeared into a maze of elusive game trails. So we made our way to a clearing (where we actually found the trail again), ate apples and nursed our wounds, then turned back for camp—and the swimming hole.

Anyway, we hope to return and explore other parts of this beautiful park, especially in the winter when the trails are easier to follow.