In a fairly spontaneous decision, we decided to go to Lesotho before heading out of South Africa and found ourselves crossing the border to Maseru the next day. Our first border crossing in Blue Lightning went incredibly smoothly (do you have anything to declare? no. Okay, drive on through). The border crossing (as usual) was pretty weird in the sense that as we crossed an arbitrary line, things went from feeling very European to decidedly African.
Maseru is unorganized, dirty and there is absolutely no proper signage, but it is vibrant and the people in Lesotho are pretty friendly. While the capital is not much to write home about, we did buy some crafts from two very enthusiastic ladies up in a strange alley / warehouse place. They were so happy about it that it was the best thing we did in Maseru. The whole country is pretty much spectacular and 1km in altitude is the minimum. Blue Lightning had a few issues with the hills, but got there all the same.
Another exciting Lesotho event to report is that we finally boiled the damned ostrich egg. It took a whole morning and Thomas had to get it open with a hacksaw. Photo below. It was totally disgusting. The whole thing pretty much just tasted like hard-boiled egg, but the egg white had this awful, grey, translucent texture.
Semonkong was beautiful though and we took a wander to a waterfall that was meant to take an hour, but ended up taking five, and resulted in us scrambling and bush bashing down a gorge (and up again) through a significant amount of stinging nettles. These are no joke.
Lesotho was also the location of our first real 4WD driving experience. By this, I mean that due to our initial choice of route being closed for road works, we chose to take a road from Semonkong up to Thaba-Tseka that was marked as a 4×4 track on the map and in respect of which we were told not to attempt it without a second car. Turns out that in Lesotho, when they say 4×4, they really mean it. What stresses me out even more is that there is an icon for “xxx 4×4 routes” – I do not even want to know about those. We managed about 24km the first afternoon. This included a stressful half hour where we almost flipped the car (I still have heart palpitations every time I think about this), and Thomas had me hanging off the bulbar on the front left side with my butt out in the air in order to weigh the thing down while he corrected the situation. Big sigh, major elation, situation averted.
Within the next 15 minutes, we managed to come up over a hill and make the idiot mistake of driving through some mud we never should have attempted. Result: stuck. After three hours of attempting to get ourselves out and digging around the tires, etc., a thunder storm turned up for the evening. This resulted in us spending the night in the cab, on a thirty degree angle, in the rain, in the bog and not sleeping at all. Seemed like a good time to polish off some canned food, Christmas cake and a bottle of red wine and whisky. Solid choice.
Next morning, of course, the situation was much, much worse due to the rainfall. We spent about six hours on our hands, knees and tummies digging out the car. Some villagers showed up and decided to help, informing us after a while that they were going to get someone with a car to come and pull us out. While this did not really mean we could stop digging, the idea of something pulling us out was pretty damned good. Imagine our surprise when about an hour later, someone who actually spoke English showed up, and on a bit of questioning on when they expected the car and what type of car it was, she smiled sweetly and informed us: “Not car, cows!”. Ah, okay, cows it is then. Both of us thought that we would need a few, but over the hill turned up two cows from the next village. The guy waited patiently for us to finish digging and then hooked those babies up to the car and swiftly pulled us out of the ditch. Amazing.
Our elation lasted about an hour until we realized that it was so wet (and it started to rain again), that we did not dare attempt continuing on the road for the moment. At this point we decided to hope fervently that the next day would be sunny and camp up for the night. Obviously at this point all the children in the village were very excited about our car and decided to join us.
The next day was indeed sunny, but unfortunately the chief’s wife turned up in the morning to inform us that the river we had to cross on the next section of road was uncrossable due to the rains (and turns out the next section of the road was also a touch too hairy for our comfort levels). We spent a while determining if there were any fields we could drive through or if we should wait for the river, all to no avail. We were stuck for yet another day. We finally decided to get the villagers to contact the cow man and get him to come back the next morning and help us back through the bog again, which he willingly did. We then had the awful road to drive back and more serious hyperventilation on my part.
Notwithstanding that this was all fairly shite and not at all what we wanted to do, I guess some people pay for experiences hanging out in local villages. Not us. All it cost us was about nine hours of heaving the worst mud ever, four days of our time, and $30 to pay the guy with the cows and a couple of other people to help us out! Also, we got a wake-up call every morning by way of the children who were heading to school standing outside our tent and yelling up at it “Good Morning”, “Hello”, “Good Morning”. We were quite the spectacle. Basically, even though it is all pretty funny in retrospect (I include pictures for everyone’s amusement), I spent the entire time in a fit of nerves freaking out over our car dying and whether we were ever going to be able to leave the place, or whether we should just cut our losses, make friends with the villagers and start building a hut. This drive was easily the scariest event of this trip thus far for me and I think it definitely took years off of my life in terms of anxiety.
After all of this, we drove through to Qacha’s Nek and then promptly got totally rained out. At this point, we gave up and decided to go to Durban to attempt to warm up, dry out, and hit up a large amount of Indian food. After Durban, we intelligently decided that it was time to get our butts across South Africa in order to avoid overstaying our visas and exit to Namibia.
As a result, our last week or so in South Africa included finishing up in Durban, a massive cross country drive to Kimberley and a very weird experience in Orania. I will limit this to a couple of notes. Kimberley was actually pretty nice (which we did not expect of a town essentially famous for mining) and we checked out the diamond mining museum and big hole. We also read more about Cecil John Rhodes than I ever wanted to know and I was confirmed in my belief that he was a pretty bad dude. Possibly the best thing about Kimberley was talking our way into the Kimberley Club that was the gentlemen’s hang out of the day and remains a members only affair. The place was incredible and it was fun to wander the rooms where all the rich and famous of the time had hung out. Also, Thomas got to try some member’s snuff and I learnt that women were only allowed in the front door for the first time eight years ago. Nice. Orania was massively creepy. For those that do not know of it – it is an Afrikaans supremacist stronghold and you have to apply to be part of the community. They even have their own currency. We did a tour, we got the DVD and we got on out.
We left South Africa with one day left on our visas – so thankfully our border crossing went well. This is also a good thing as we had stockpiled enough alcohol to start a bar in South Africa and it was time to go and see something other than wineries.
February 2014