International Segue (South Africa / Lesotho Part II)
There were more than a few reasons I had to postpone writing about the second part of my trip, but none of them were because I had run out of exciting things to talk about. Following my encounters with sharks and baboons, penguins and foggy mountain paths, I still had yet to face what would be the focus of my trip, the tiny land-locked country of Lesotho (les-oo-too).
Leaving Cape Town was difficult but Andrea and I jumped on our sketchy Nationwide airlines flight to Johannesburg. Nationwide airlines had recently had their whole fleet grounded because they had an engine fall out of one of their planes. Our particular flight was one of eight planes cleared to fly by the African version of the FAA. This was a liiiiitle disconcerting, but we hopped onboard anyway and arrived safely in Joburg to meet our new partners in crime, Andrew Robertson out of Yellowknife and Natalie Wallister out of Windhoek, Namibia. We trucked out of that crazy city before the sun had peaked and headed on our way to the city of Bloemfontein (apparently the birthplace of J.R.R. Tolkien) in our tiny beater Volkswagen Citi, letting the cars and busses zoom past us on the highway.
When we arrived in Bloemfontein, we shacked up overnight in an old water tower converted to a hostel. Andrew and I decided to go out for dinner with the crazy drunken owner, Terry, a wealthy retired surgeon who was out to celebrate his “adopted son” marking 3 months off of a heroin addiction. We dined in the finest restaurant in the city with four servers refilling our glasses and doting on our needs, and no wonder, as Terry began to buy rounds of Jagermeister shots for everyone. Including the staff. And the cooks, who on his insistence, had to leave the kitchen and join us for drinks. It was surreal. We then went to the local shack/bar, where Terry was the only drunk old man, and met some of the locals. I kept finding myself in conversations with cute girls. The drinks were free. I really wished I didn’t have to get up at 5am to leave the country.
Five am, the abandoned water tower hostel.
I rolled from my bunk and dragged my pack to the waiting cars, which deposited our groggy selves in the midst of a garbage strewn back alley in a run down area of town. There were a lot of people staring as we dragged our supplies through a crowded plaza and went in search of bus tickets to get us to the Lesotho border. We piled onboard, and before I knew it I had a breastfeeding mother squashed against me in a corner while we bumped along to the border.
Crossing into Lesotho went smoothly enough, but we were ill prepared for the holiday rush. As we entered the bus depot in the capital city of Maseru under the scathing beam of the late morning sun, we were confronted with hundreds of locals piled high with bags and odds and ends, umbrellas and goats, ears of corn and shopping bags of fake watches and recyclables. The rush was on to return to their villages of origin. We struggled to communicate as me pushed through the masses and lines, fumes of running bus engines wafting into our nostrils. The noise was raucous and the air hot and full of the thick potent smells of raw fleshy humanity. We could get no certain answers, we guarded our bags with anxious attention, and we stood in lines only to move and move again with renewed “information”. My skin began to burn as the bus to our destination pulled away from us, full to capacity (and let me tell you, Africans know all about the “capacity” of a bus. We realized we had not eaten. Our hopes were growing dim, but a local taxi microbus was licensed to drive to our destination and we quickly piled in under the urges of a local girl we had befriended (although she spoke nearly no English, but we shared a cheap umbrella from the sun). Others followed frantically, and we barely got aboard. We paid for seats for our bags, but they ended up piled on top of me anyway as 14 people and their luggage were piled into an eleven seat vehicle. We roared out of the city and off into the mountains to the screaming accordion music and beer-breath shouting of holiday reveler passengers. I lost circulation in my legs and soaked in sweat under the 300lbs of bags piled on top of me, covering all but my head. Luckily, two hours into this, someone got out and we shared the load around a bit more, and the rest of the drive was a comparable breeze. Shouting brash accordion jams took us around dirt road mountain bends, with pit stops at liquor shacks and hairpin mountain turns while we attempted to navigate around jackknifed tractor trailers loaded with beer. It was an odyssey.
A few hours later we arrived in the tin roofed mountain village of Semonkong, the base for our trek. We stumbled out of the microbus into a canyon cut by a river, beneath a rainbow, to the sounds of horses whinnying in the background.
Unfortunately, that section of my trip took place mostly in areas you don’t want to be brandishing a nice camera in.
Leaving Cape Town was difficult but Andrea and I jumped on our sketchy Nationwide airlines flight to Johannesburg. Nationwide airlines had recently had their whole fleet grounded because they had an engine fall out of one of their planes. Our particular flight was one of eight planes cleared to fly by the African version of the FAA. This was a liiiiitle disconcerting, but we hopped onboard anyway and arrived safely in Joburg to meet our new partners in crime, Andrew Robertson out of Yellowknife and Natalie Wallister out of Windhoek, Namibia. We trucked out of that crazy city before the sun had peaked and headed on our way to the city of Bloemfontein (apparently the birthplace of J.R.R. Tolkien) in our tiny beater Volkswagen Citi, letting the cars and busses zoom past us on the highway.
When we arrived in Bloemfontein, we shacked up overnight in an old water tower converted to a hostel. Andrew and I decided to go out for dinner with the crazy drunken owner, Terry, a wealthy retired surgeon who was out to celebrate his “adopted son” marking 3 months off of a heroin addiction. We dined in the finest restaurant in the city with four servers refilling our glasses and doting on our needs, and no wonder, as Terry began to buy rounds of Jagermeister shots for everyone. Including the staff. And the cooks, who on his insistence, had to leave the kitchen and join us for drinks. It was surreal. We then went to the local shack/bar, where Terry was the only drunk old man, and met some of the locals. I kept finding myself in conversations with cute girls. The drinks were free. I really wished I didn’t have to get up at 5am to leave the country.
Five am, the abandoned water tower hostel.
I rolled from my bunk and dragged my pack to the waiting cars, which deposited our groggy selves in the midst of a garbage strewn back alley in a run down area of town. There were a lot of people staring as we dragged our supplies through a crowded plaza and went in search of bus tickets to get us to the Lesotho border. We piled onboard, and before I knew it I had a breastfeeding mother squashed against me in a corner while we bumped along to the border.
Crossing into Lesotho went smoothly enough, but we were ill prepared for the holiday rush. As we entered the bus depot in the capital city of Maseru under the scathing beam of the late morning sun, we were confronted with hundreds of locals piled high with bags and odds and ends, umbrellas and goats, ears of corn and shopping bags of fake watches and recyclables. The rush was on to return to their villages of origin. We struggled to communicate as me pushed through the masses and lines, fumes of running bus engines wafting into our nostrils. The noise was raucous and the air hot and full of the thick potent smells of raw fleshy humanity. We could get no certain answers, we guarded our bags with anxious attention, and we stood in lines only to move and move again with renewed “information”. My skin began to burn as the bus to our destination pulled away from us, full to capacity (and let me tell you, Africans know all about the “capacity” of a bus. We realized we had not eaten. Our hopes were growing dim, but a local taxi microbus was licensed to drive to our destination and we quickly piled in under the urges of a local girl we had befriended (although she spoke nearly no English, but we shared a cheap umbrella from the sun). Others followed frantically, and we barely got aboard. We paid for seats for our bags, but they ended up piled on top of me anyway as 14 people and their luggage were piled into an eleven seat vehicle. We roared out of the city and off into the mountains to the screaming accordion music and beer-breath shouting of holiday reveler passengers. I lost circulation in my legs and soaked in sweat under the 300lbs of bags piled on top of me, covering all but my head. Luckily, two hours into this, someone got out and we shared the load around a bit more, and the rest of the drive was a comparable breeze. Shouting brash accordion jams took us around dirt road mountain bends, with pit stops at liquor shacks and hairpin mountain turns while we attempted to navigate around jackknifed tractor trailers loaded with beer. It was an odyssey.
A few hours later we arrived in the tin roofed mountain village of Semonkong, the base for our trek. We stumbled out of the microbus into a canyon cut by a river, beneath a rainbow, to the sounds of horses whinnying in the background.
Unfortunately, that section of my trip took place mostly in areas you don’t want to be brandishing a nice camera in.