Malolotja Nature Reserve is eighteen thousand hectares of highveld grassland in the Hhohho region of northwestern Eswatini, on the South African border, that has never been ploughed, crossed on foot among herds of antelope with no dangerous animals between the walker and them, and it holds the country's highest waterfall and an ochre mine worked 48,000 years ago. The reserve rises from 600 to 1,800 metres over the Ngwenya mountains, grassland rolling to the horizon with forest in the gorges, and because no lion, elephant or rhino live here it is walked alone, on more than 200 kilometres of trails past blesbok, eland, zebra and mountain reedbuck grazing the open plateau; the rangers set fire to blocks of the grass on purpose each winter, since most of what lives here depends on the burning, and in October and November the lilies, orchids and red-hot pokers open across the plateau in the short window before the summer grass closes over them. The Malolotja falls drop about ninety metres into a gorge with no road to it, reached by a hard day's walk down and back.
The Lion Cavern on the Ngwenya ridge is the oldest known mine on Earth, where people dug red ochre 48,000 years ago for paint and ritual, the ore being rust, iron that settled out of the ocean before the air had oxygen in it, and the modern iron mine beside it has closed. Seventeen wilderness camps are scattered across the reserve, each just a place beside a river with no hut, no tap and no toilet, for walkers carrying everything, and in the Silotshwane gorge eleven platforms are bolted into the trees above the Majolomba river, linked by ten zip slides and a suspension bridge. Blue swallows, among the rarest birds in southern Africa, are back on the plateau from late September to April, hunting low over the short grass in the reserve that is the stronghold of the country's tiny population. Malolotja is grassland that was never turned, and it is walked without a fence or a gun.