A 60 kilometre road takes 3 hours to drive at an approximate speed of 20 km/hr (12 mi/hr), cobbled with loose stones, potholes and drinks of water. Thick lines of water trickle from every orifice in the hills' crevices, bubbling out into the roads and larger tributaries, gurgling across bridges. Mist fingers through mountains, sweeping around snow caps and edgy rock faces, dripping into valleys, eventually merging with the drifts of smoke leaking from every hut. Pools of sun highlight thatch rooftops and striped balaclavas, atop bounding, medieval horsemen cloaked in woolen Basotho blankets. Shimmers of white flicker across mountainsides as angora goats gloat and bleat. My little white "Twinkie" shines and rattles through the morning, rousing laughter from the shepards, children and horsemen at the size of the smallest car to ever challenge the rough roads of Lesotho. Our trip, barely starting, was already historic in the fresh Lesotho landscape.
Ten days and 9 nights marked my longest camping trip ever, shared with my ardent Johannes. After eight months in Belgium, Johannes' request for his time in South Africa was to spend as many waking moments outdoors as possible. We strutted across some of SA's worst pot-holed roads to land our first night in Maseru, the capital city of Lesotho.
Maseru begs for love from the first sighting of the border post; litter is strewn across muddied roads and throngs of people bust forth from Taxis and alight the stands of magwenya (fetkoek) and pots of steaming pap and cabbage. Nestled amongst some pretty sizable hills, Maseru is a bubble of the usual African chaos that South Africa tends to lack: cacophonous honking, insidious overtaking cars, blacked-out traffic lights, overloaded trucks with pieces of wood and furniture threatening to topple, and hoards of people walking home from work - bags of maize-meal balanced overhead and hips wagging to the speed of Africa-time.
We arrived in Maseru a day early, realising that heavy rain-fall might impact the drivability of the roads. We camped one night in a soggy spot, overlooking a mid-sized dam - we were the only campers as the rain fell and the mud froze into thick cakes. Even amongst the rain and the cold, there's nothing quite like making a fire on a cliff to the sounds of sangomas delivering the souls of customers through the beating of drums and a chorus of chants.
Our picturesque drive to Semonkong was easier than expected, although slow and, at times, a bit treacherous. Lesotho has a very limited system of tarred roads and it took us an hour on tar and 3 hours on dirt to reach a location only 100 km (62 miles) away. The dirt roads steadily decrease in quality the further they are from Maseru. The traffic we passed was limited to a couple of Taxis, a bus and a few bakkies - nary a small compact car to be seen! The majority of our passing roadsmen were actually men on horses and donkeys, as the "Basotho pony" is the mainstay in Lesotho Department of Transportation. It's a chicken and an egg scenario; which came first the bad roads or the ponies? Well, most likely the lack of roads encouraged equestrian development and with the introduction of horses to Southern Africa in 1653, the paths and trails running across the Maloti and Drakensburg mountains have been etched into the geography for hundreds of years. With the majority of the population surviving off subsistence farming, a greater infrastructure of roads will probably never be a possibility, considering the severity of slopes and passes throughout the rippling mountain ranges.
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