A week overlanding through Eswatini

Most travellers treat Eswatini as a day trip

The typical international visitor to the Kingdom of Eswatini — formerly Swaziland, renamed in 2018 — enters from the South African side of the Oshoek/Ngwenya border post, spends a day in the Ezulwini Valley doing the Mantenga Cultural Village and the Swazi candle factory, and returns to Johannesburg or Nelspruit before evening. This is a version of Eswatini. It is a thin one.

We spent seven nights in the country in May 2022, entering at Ngwenya and exiting at the Lomahasha/Namaacha border into Mozambique. The week covered roughly 400 kilometres of Eswatini’s road network, which is small enough that 400 kilometres crosses most of the country and doubles back. Population: approximately 1.2 million. Area: 17,364 square kilometres, roughly the size of Wales. Africa’s last absolute monarchy, ruled since 1986 by King Mswati III.

Mbabane and the Ezulwini Valley: day one and two

Mbabane is the capital in a loose administrative sense — the palace and government ministries occupy the Ezulwini Valley below the city rather than the city itself, which is a chaotic, traffic-dense commercial town of perhaps 100,000 people with no particular tourist centre. We spent an afternoon there because we wanted to understand what the capital of Eswatini looked like on a workday, which turned out to be: taxi ranks, a large covered market, construction dust, government office buildings from the 1970s, and a population that moves at the specific pace of a city built for foot traffic and motorcycles rather than cars.

The Ezulwini Valley — the “Valley of Heaven” in siSwati — is where the tourist infrastructure lives. The Mantenga Nature Reserve contains the Mantenga Falls (a set of double-drop falls on the Lusushwana River), the Mantenga Swazi Cultural Village (a reconstructed traditional village with daily dance performances), and a small reserve where you can walk near game on foot. The cultural village is well-constructed and the performers are residents of the surrounding community rather than bused-in talent. The dance is genuine — imbued with siSwati musical traditions — and the knowledge the guides share about traditional building, food preparation, and medicine is specific and unsanitised.

The Swazi candle factory nearby is a modest artisan operation employing local women to make brightly coloured candles in animal shapes. It has been on every Eswatini travel itinerary for thirty years. The candles are handsome and genuinely made on site. Whether they represent the best cultural engagement available in Eswatini is a different question.

Hlane Royal National Park: days three and four

Hlane is the largest protected area in Eswatini and is managed directly by the royal family’s conservation organisation, the Swaziland Royal Trust. It covers about 30,000 hectares of lowveld savanna in the northeast of the country, accessible from the MR3 road to the Mozambique border.

The big mammal population includes lion, white rhino, elephant, and leopard. We saw rhino on both days — white rhino, including a mother and calf that were grazing fifty metres from the camp perimeter — and lion on a late-afternoon drive on day four. The lion sighting was a female sleeping on a termite mound at 4pm, entirely indifferent to our vehicle. Our guide said she was one of five lions in the current Hlane pride, all descended from animals brought from a South African reserve as part of a reintroduction programme in the mid-2000s.

The accommodation at Hlane camp — thatched chalets around a waterhole — is basic and excellent. The waterhole at dawn draws impala, kudu, warthog, and the occasional white rhino from a direction you do not expect. Breakfast is eaten at an outdoor table overlooking the waterhole. It is the kind of accommodation that gets everything right by not trying too hard.

Mlilwane Wildlife Sanctuary: days five and six

Mlilwane is the oldest wildlife sanctuary in Eswatini and sits in the Ezulwini Valley, within sight of Mbabane. It was established in the 1960s by Ted Reilly, a Swazi-born conservationist who convinced the royal family to fence and rehabilitate land that had been degraded by overgrazing. Mlilwane is unusual because it is a walkable sanctuary — you can leave the vehicle and walk on foot among the game, which includes hippos, zebra, wildebeest, nyala, warthog, and a large population of red-billed oxpeckers. There are no predators, which is what makes it safe for walking.

The mountain biking in Mlilwane — trails through the bushveld, crossing game paths, past grazing zebra — is one of the more unusual activity combinations in southern Africa: cycling through wildlife, on your own without a guide, for an afternoon. The trails are marked and the serious predator-free status means the risk is limited to aggressive warthogs, which are fast and bad-tempered but manageable on a bicycle.

What Eswatini delivers that its neighbours don’t

Eswatini is the one country in this corner of Africa where the monarchy is genuinely embedded in daily life in a visible way: the king’s photograph appears in shops and offices, Reed Dance ceremonies convene thousands of women at the royal palace each year, and the cultural continuity that the country’s political structure has maintained — whatever one thinks of that structure — has preserved traditional practices that have been eroded in the more urbanised South Africa.

This is not naive admiration of the political system, which is an absolute monarchy with limited press freedom and documented human rights concerns. It is an observation about what the country feels like to travel through: coherent, traditional in ways that feel lived rather than performed, and less developed in ways that reveal the actual landscape and culture rather than a curated version of it.

An Eswatini cultural day tour from within the country covers the Mantenga highlights effectively for visitors with a single day available.