Piggs Peak

Piggs Peak was where Eswatini first genuinely surprised me. I had driven north from Mbabane on a clear April morning, but by the time I reached the escarpment the cloud had come in from the east and the road was threading through mist so thick the pines on either side were reduced to silhouettes. The town itself — named after a gold prospector called William Pigg who found deposits here in 1884 — sits at over 1,100 meters, and in the cool mornings it has the quality of a place that is not particularly aware of being looked at. Functional, small, unbothered. I liked it immediately.

The town is a base rather than a destination, but it earns its keep. The area around Piggs Peak holds some of Eswatini’s most intact indigenous Highveld forest — Afromontane vegetation on the upper slopes, mist forest in the deeper valleys, the kind of green that has been growing undisturbed long enough to develop a particular density. The Phophonyane Nature Reserve, a few kilometers from town, sits inside one of these valleys and is accessible on walking trails that follow a river through forest to a series of waterfalls. I went in the late afternoon when the light was low enough to catch the spray, and the whole place had the quality of somewhere that has been correctly left alone.

The forest around the falls smells of wet stone and cycads and something floral and unplaceable that changes slightly as you move through different vegetation zones. I kept stopping to register it, the way you do when a smell is specific enough to want to name. The birds were relentless — green pigeons, sunbirds, a pair of crowned hornbills that kept pace with me along the trail for an unexpected distance.

The area also carries a significant craft history. The Ngwenya Glass factory near the Ngwenya border post (on the road back toward Mbabane) has been producing recycled glass art since the 1980s, and while it leans heavily toward the tourist end of things in its retail section, watching the furnace work is genuinely striking — the molten glass catching a red that has no equivalent in natural light.

There is also the matter of the casino hotel on the edge of town, a kind of architectural non-sequitur that appears in many African highland towns and which I find oddly comforting — proof that a place is visited by people who come with specific intentions that have nothing to do with my own, and that the world is large enough to accommodate all of it.

When to go: April through October, with April particularly good for the post-rains lush vegetation and the waterfalls running strong from the summer rains. The mist is persistent year-round in the mornings, which is either a feature or a problem depending on your relationship with damp weather.