Must be the clouds in my eyes

30 Nov 2008:

With some sadness, I climbed in the Land Rover instead of aboard a mountain bike and headed up Sani Pass. Our companions were a mother and daughter from Jo’burg, a pair of post-college kids from Belgium, and our driver, Busani. Making me even sadder, the weather was gorgeous on the way up. The road itself was very bumpy, rocky, and unrelentingly ascending. All told, it is about 20 km from Underberg, with an elevation gain of about 1600 meters (5000 feet). The longest uphill I’ve done in a day was climbing Mt Tam with my crazy German roommate several years back (20 miles each way and a fairly steep climb of 4000 ft at the end), but those were in bygone days when I was well conditioned. I’m sure I would have struggled with this one, and not just with the grade but also with the technical parts of quite a rocky climb. And the descent would have been sheer pain on the forearms and hands. But man, would it have been fun.

Anyway, we got gorgeous views along the way up the bumpy ride. Near the top, we produced our passports and headed into another country! Lesotho was beautiful in a mountainous sort of way. We first visited a village and were invited into a hut with a family (all pre-arranged with the tour group). Five very cute children ages 1 to maybe 10 watched us from the doorway as we paraded in to a circular mud and brick hut (bricks fashioned from cow dung) with no windows. We learned that the lack of windows was due to the extreme cold in the winter (20 below or more); they also had their only door facing away from the prevailing winds for the same reason. They had central heating as well, after a fashion: a fire pit in the middle of the floor with an array of larger stones arranged around it (buried under the earthen floor) to retain the heat of the fire. They would put out the fire at night when the door was to be closed, and these stones would remain warm and heat the house for the rest of the night. When they could open the door again for light and ventilation in the morning, they would restart the fire and begin re-warming the stones. They also cook in the fire pit, and our hostess offered us delicious bread made from the grains that constituted the majority of their nutrition. It was hot out of the fire pit and absolutely spectactular. The hut was maybe 15 feet in diameter, maybe less. It had a small bed at one end but most of the family slept on sheepskins on the floor. One side of it had a small bench that was a built-in part of the wall; we sat on this. The one-year old girl waddled up to me and hugged my leg right after I sat down, just before her mother whisked her up in her arms. After we heard about the lifestyle of a typical Basotho family (the name of the people in Lesotho), and learned a few phrases in Sisotho, we made a donation and I bought some crafts that the mother had made.

We then looked around the village a bit (briefly; it was very small) and our driver pointed out a nearby empty square building that was soon to be a school and clinic for the village. Apparently this and several other clinics like it had been donated to Lesotho villages by none other than Sir Elton John! No details were available on this unexpected benefactor. Busani also told us about some other Basotho customs, including that most boys headed up to the mountains by the age of 10 to herd sheep for the village; they would typically return to society at around 20, at which point they would be circumcised and be known as men. They decorated their walking sticks to commemorate this transformation; one can identify each Basotho man by his personalized stick.

After seeing the village, we went back to the top of Sani Pass to eat lunch at a pub (slogan: “The Highest Pub in Africa”) that adjoined the Sani Top Chalet (slogan: “Lesotho is not for wusses”. Seriously, that’s on their brochures, word for word. It’s part of a longer treatise about how this is more a lodge than a hotel, and things like “heat” and “running water” don’t always work). I ate well, tried Masuti (the only mass-produced Lesotho beer), and then left to find a dense fog had rolled in over the pass that obscured vision beyond 20 feet. At this point, I must confess, I was pretty happy not to be on a bike with that technical rocky descent ahead of me (though it would have been possible).

The part of Lesotho I got a brief glimpse of was much poorer than most of South Africa that I have seen. The land was barren except for sparse grass, barely enough for the sheep to gnaw on; for this reason the herds must constantly be on the move (shepherded by the 10+ year olds, mostly). The village was beyond simple, and they had to traipse kilometers to gather water or grain. There was one supply store owned by the rich guy in town; he stocks up in Underberg and sells to the Basotho people as they are able to afford goods. He is apparently doing well enough to have sent his children to Europe for schooling. Otherwise, though, boys do not get education beyond age 10 (shepherding age), while girls and young boys must travel great distances to school. Apparently 2 million people live there; this was hard to fathom given the small corner of it that I saw, as the country is quite small and what I saw was very sparsely populated and indeed did not seem capable of sustaining dense population. Perhaps things are different in and around Maseru, the capital on the northwestern end of the country.

We headed down in the mist uneventfully and headed on our way (but not before Busani gave us “certificates of adventure” for sitting on our ass all day). Back home, in Northdale, we had dinner with Sne (the 11 year old daughter of someone from the office) and she led us in a rousing game of Go Fish. She also told me my pronunciation of her full name was improving, but still not quite right.

p.s. another song reference in the title; maybe this one’s easier…