Swaziland

...is small. So small, that we drove across it, including through their biggest city at rush hour, and we were still on the road for less than 4 hours. 

...is a kingdom. With a king!

...has an awesome flag. The red is blood of the ancestors or the soil (depending on the source of information), the yellow is the gold found there, the blue is the sky, and the shield is black and white to show the countries racial harmony (which we only had two days to see, but it seems much better off than South Africa in this sense).

...has a hot springs tuned into a public pool. How cool is that?!?

...is beautiful.

Honoring Tom

A pretty cool set of events came together just right, and Amy, my Peace Corps recruiter and a Malawi RPCV, is in Eshowe, which we were already planning on passing by. So, we got to spend two nights hanging out with her. 

An even more amazing coincidence is that we would be spending September 3rd together. This year, September 3rd marks the fourth anniversary of the very tragic loss of Tom Maresco, a Gator PCV that was serving in Lesotho and passed away protecting a fellow PCV during a mugging gone very wrong. 

So, Amy, Cam, and I honored Tom the way any of us would have wanted, by celebrating his the life. We enjoyed a Black Label on the beach (his beer), saw zebras, then spent the evening back in Eshowe at Pablo Esco Bar, cheersing a life taken too soon.

Sanchia's

Sanchia, a good friend of ours and a former lecturer at Mzuzu University that left just about a month before we did, hosted us in Petermerytzburg for a few nights. It's was really neat getting to hang out in such a different setting from Malawi and her home-town. We got to experience the Indian-South African culture first hand. 

At one point, we went to a comedy show where we were heckled a little by one of the comedians (although, he showed his ignorance of the states when he asked Cam is Wisconsin was in the south). The funniest part of it was that, mid-joke, he'd stop walk over to where we were, and explain the South African context to us, in a very humorous way (we didn't really need most of the explanations, but still hilarious).