Day 34 - 21.01.12

Today we woke up with the warm comfort that we will be getting back into South Africa!!

We knew the roads were good and the distance was not so far for us to reach St Lucia, so we decided to have breakfast and get on the road.

The route out of Maputo is quite straight forward, and the GPS was able to guide us without any problems and before we knew it we were seeing signs for the Swaziland border.

Going through those borders was a dream, took us less then 5 minutes at both the Mozambique and Swaziland sides.

The roads in Swaziland are in poor condition, but still easily rideable. About an hour or 2 later we were at the border for South Africa!

After going for so long, I let my guard down for 2 minutes at the border and almost lost my sunglasses.
I took them off to take this photo and rode off with them loose on my bike, a local picked them up and the police from Swaziland took me to his house to fetch them, very nice people, it was 36C and here I am in full riding gear running around after a pair of sunglasses, IMO was waiting for me back in South Africa.

Once we cleared the border and were on our way to St Lucia we decided that we were going to stop for petrol at the Total in Hluhluwe and have some decent food....damn it feels good to be back in South Africa!  Everything just works!

We stopped at the Black Steer after fueling up then pushed through to St Lucia and Bibs Backpackers.

We both wanted our own rooms to freshen up before we head home tomorrow!

Funny story behind the own rooms though:
IMO held out his hand with 2 keys in it, said you choose which one you want, so I did, I took the top key and we went to the rooms, he was all happy with his room, I walked into mine and it smelt like someone had left dead fish inside the room for a few days, so went back to reception and demanded another room.
IMO insisted sorry buddy, luck of the draw (Toin Coss!... I couldnt get the saying Coin Toss right at the begining of the trip and we adopted that as our saying for lets take a chance)
They gave me the key for the next room (which was also their last available room) and I went to my room and it smelled very moist inside, but still better then the dead fish smell. Anyway the funny part of the story was that the room IMO had did not have an aircon and I did have one, and it was a quite a warm evening. (so Toin Coss!!)

I spent the rest of the evening listening to my iPod and reading in the comfort of my airconditioned room.