Travel to Swaziland was once again an African travel day experience. We leave Beira on Thursday afternoon and are blessed with a bus with sleeper beds which includes a bed for each of us. That bus ride takes 15 hours. After spending a day/night in Maputo we are off again and this time to our next country and ministry site of Swaziland. 27 of us pack into a 25 seater bus with all of our big packs. And yes there were quite a few people without real seats. We were told/expected that this bus ride would take an hour to the border and then 2 more hours to our ministry site. Shortest travel day yet!!! And that is why they tell you not to have expectations on the World Race.
We depart from Maputo at 1pm. At 3pm (2 hours later, not 1) we arrive at the Mozambique/Swaziland border. All of us make it through fine within an hour and the other bus of 3 teams leaves while we wait for our driver. We soon find out that our driver does not have a real passport. He has been let out of Mozambique, but is not allowed into Swaziland. So in other words… we are stuck at the border. Our amazing logistics guys (Nick is one of them) get to work immediately trying to find out a solution to this problem.
Finally at 7:45 pm (over 4.5 hours at the border and the border closes at 8pm) a new driver arrives and is ready to take us into Swaziland. God likes to make sure we trust Him all the way up to the last minute. We drop one team off between 9-10pm and continue on our way to El Shaddai Orphanage. At 1:00am we are at the base of the mountain where we need to go. We have a guide we are following, but after trying to get this rickety old bus up this mountain, the bus eventually dies and we are stuck. Oh great! What do we do now?
We take off some big packs and load them into the contact’s truck and we get off the bus with our day packs and continue to hike up this big hill at 2am. The bus starts and is helped/pushed up. After we reach the top of this hill, we get back on the bus and we continue to the orphanage. By the time we arrive at El Shaddai it is 3am.
Did I mention we thought this was going to be the quickest/easiest travel day? Yeah when you expect 3 hours and add Africa circumstances into the mix, you will most definitely come out with a travel day of 14 hours.
