Christmas in a stable

The title says it all really. We awoke on Christmas morning after spending the night in a stable that had been converted into a bunk bed style dormitory which could have slept another 30 or more people but we had the whole place to ourselves. The horses had been to another proper stable close-by. Christmas breakfast was taken outside in the warm morning sun, we were surrounded by fields and hills, and little much else. To prepare for our planned feast later on we walked and then walked some more, and returned to a tasty meal of roast beef and vegetables supported by a amusingly named red wine of Fat Bastard. Dessert consisted of an electric mix of freshly picked blackberries (which brought back childhood memories of clambering into blackberry bushes by the roadside), cheese and chocolates. Of course it still felt strange, like last year, to not be surrounded by the Wootton family but the good friends and the unusual location still made it a special and enjoyable Christmas.

Swaziland or is it somewhere back home?

The place is very green. There are hills, some look like mountains, very few people and it is drizzling. At first I was a bit confused as to where exactly we had ended up after crossing the border into Swaziland from South Africa. It looked like the Lake or Peak District back home and this view was reinforced over the next few days as we did plenty of walking in between sheltering indoors to avoid the rain and to keep warm. Because it was Christmas we had expected many more people, yet Swaziland felt fairly sparsely populated and as we discovered later on all the South African’s had moved en-mass to the coast of Mozambique. For a whole variety of connotations one pre-Christmas walk involved climbing a mountain called Sheba’s Breast and it did not fail to deliver some wonderful scenery.