South Africa and Lesotho Part II: The Kingdom of the Sky

Whereby Michael and I take a road trip to Lesotho, ride horses to a remote village, sleep in a mud hut, are stalked by wild dogs, and (barely) survive a mosquito and cockroach apocalypse

Prologue: Johannesburg to Maseru

Our trip began inauspiciously. Michael and I had hatched an ambitious plan to road trip to Lesotho, a tiny mountain kingdom wholly within the borders of South Africa. We would arrive in Johannesburg at 11 a.m., immediately rent a car, and make the 7-hour road trip to a mountain camp called Malealea Lodge, arriving before dark.

Despite a slight delay from Johannesburg, we had arrived at the car rental kiosk by noon. That’s where the trouble started. Not only did the car rental agency not have a GPS (critical when traveling to a country with no cell phone service), but – more importantly – they did not have the paperwork necessary for us to cross the border. The previous day had been a holiday in South Africa, and therefore, the sales rep explained to us, the staff was “still on holiday time”. Holiday time meant we finally got our paperwork at 2 p.m. Sunset was at 6 p.m. The drive was 7 hours.

After a quick weighing of the risk/reward of attempting a cross-Lesotho drive in the pitch black with no electricity and no cell phone reception, in an “economy” rental car, Michael and I decided to change plans and overnight in Maseru, Lesotho’s capital, just over the border from South Africa.

And so, we began our drive.

At first, the scenery looked amazingly like the Midwest. Flat plains and corn fields, punctuated by fields of sunflowers craning their necks to the East.

Other than the challenge of driving on the wrong side of the road, the drive was remarkably easy – even boring. Then, slowly, the landscape became hillier, with flat mesa-like structures beginning to protrude from the plains. It looked like Arizona, but greener. And finally, as we neared the Lesotho border, the mesas began to form peaks, the road began to wind and we began to gain elevation.

Lesotho is called the Kingdom of the Sky because it sits at a high elevation – approximately 6,000 feet. In fact, Lesotho technically beats Nepal as the highest country in the world: meaning that its ‘low point’ is higher than the low point of any other nation. In the winter, much of the country is covered in snow, and the Basotho people keep warm by wearing distinctive blankets over their light outfits.

At the border, we eased into a line of idling trucks, taxis, vans, pedestrians, and farm animals, all vying to cross the checkpoint. By African border crossing standards, this one was relatively orderly: I sprinted to the border post with both of our passports as Mike inched forward in the car line. Soon enough, we were through both checkpoints and into Lesotho.

By that point it was pitch black, and we applauded ourselves for our foresight in deciding to stay the night in Maseru, which was just 5 km past the border. Ten minutes later, we pulled up to the gate of Lancer's Inn. Post-check in, the first words out of Michael’s mouth were: “I need a beer.” A cross-border road trip is quite an initiation to a new continent, and, in a particularly baller move, Michael had done the entire drive himself.

Act I: Maseru to Malealea, Followed Immediately by Horse Trek to Unnamed Village

We hit the road by 7 a.m. in order to make it to Malealea Lodge by 9 a.m., when our pony trek was set to start (more on that, later).

At first, the road was flat and paved. With the exception of light rush hour traffic, mysteriously placed speed bumps on the highway, and ubiquitous cattle crossings, things were going pretty smoothly. Then we got to the “last 7 km”. We had read about the Last 7 km on tripadvisor, and had been warned on the lodge website. Yes, the road was a gravel road. But not like the gravel roads in the U.S. It was more of a … rock and pothole disaster. Sharp rocks, and big potholes. In the middle of nowhere, in a compact rental car, with no cell phone service, dodging pedestrians and livestock who clearly had no idea how terrifying our journey had suddenly become. “Right, right, right… left, left… slow down!” I’d scream as Michael eased between jagged potholes, attempting to adjust to the unfamiliarity of the steering wheel being positioned on the right side of the car. An excruciating 45 minutes later, we finally pulled up to Malealea Lodge.

“I need a beer,” Michael groaned. “I’m going to the bar.”

Unfortunately, it was not to be. Our guide was already waiting impatiently, bags and horses in tow, and we were told that if we were to make it to the village by sundown (not again!) we had to set off immediately.

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Lesotho Interlude

Let me pause here to explain what the hell it was we were doing here, and why. Lesotho is a tiny, remote, impoverished country completely engulfed by South Africa and yet sharing very little in common with it. Most people still live in their traditional way, as subsistence farmers and cattle herders, and the country generally lacks electricity, running water, and infrastructure. That said, it is safe, mountainous, and beautiful. It was intriguing. How could this tiny place exist within an industrialized nation, so untouched, inaccessible? We had to visit. So, we carved out four days from our 8-day South Africa trip, and dedicated them to Lesotho.

But what to do once you’re in Lesotho? Where do you go? We decided that if we were to visit this place, we would try to seep as deep into the heartland as possible, given our limited time.

That’s where the horses come in. Given Lesotho’s mountainous terrain and lack of infrastructure, many places are accessible only on the back of the trusty Basotho pony, which has for centuries transported people and goods across the crags and cliffs, across rivers, and over mountain passes.

Shrewdly, an outfit called Malealea Lodge had caught on to the appeal – for certain tourists – of being able to travel out to these untouched villages. The lodge had been established as a trading post in the early 1900s, and had existed in one form or another ever since. About 15 years ago, after many incarnations that included a bank, a co-operative, a luxury guesthouse, and a backpacker hostel, Malealea decided to start offering pony treks.

The “overnight pony trek” was marketed as a “rough and tough” experience whereby the riders set off in a small group, accompanied by a guide, across the mountains surrounding Malealea. After 6 hours on horseback, the riders come to Ha Lebona village, approximately 20km from Malealea, where they spend the night in a traditional Basotho hut called a Rondavel. The following morning the riders return back to Malealea via a different route.

==

This is what we had signed up for, and here we were, at 9 a.m., at Malealea Lodge.

“Do you have food and water?” our guide asked us.

We looked at each other… shit, no we don’t. “Is there a store?”

Yes, there was a small shop just outside the gate where we could stock up on provisions, and also pick up some candles (we had forgotten a flashlight – a key tool in a place where there is no electricity and it becomes so dark at night that you can’t see your hand in front of your face).

Michael and I hastily decided that I would repack our things into a backpack, while he would grab the provisions.

15 minutes later, Michael had returned.

“What did you get?” I asked.

“I got sardines and chicken.”

“Sardines… good good…. What do you mean chicken?”

“Like, raw chicken.”

I assumed Michael was joking, shrugged my shoulders, and threw our bags onto the backs of our ponies.

==

Pony Interlude

Let me stop here for a moment, and explain the pony situation. Neither one of us had been on any sort of equine animal for at least 20 years, nor did we know how to ride them. Michael’s “pony” was actually a horse, and was incredibly lazy. My pony was large and flatulent. Our guide instructed us to cajole our ponies into movement by digging our feet into their flanks, yelling “hai!” and making a clicking sound. If that failed, he instructed us to hit the horses in the haunches with a branch. The way to get your horse to turn was to pull on its reins in the appropriate direction, and the way to get it to stop was to pull up on the reins until the pony’s mouth shot upward and it snarled, unable to continue down the road.

This sounded easy in theory, but in practice it consisted of Michael desperately clicking and smacking his horse with a twig while the horse stood serenely, face down, munching on grass. I fared only slightly better: any efforts to incentivize my horse to movement were met with a loud, smacking fart, which invariably landed on Michael, whose horse was always behind mine.

==

Nonetheless, eventually our motley crew set out for the village. After 90 minutes on horseback, three things became apparent to us:

1. There was clearly a hole in the ozone layer here, because we burned through our sun block as quickly as we applied it. Michael’s neck became so red that he finally fashioned an extra shirt onto the back of his baseball cap, like a Bedouin.

2. Going down a cliff on horseback is no fun. The horse leans precariously forward, pulling the reins and threatening to topple you off, over its back. You feel the hoofs scraping on jagged rocks, and hear the loose stones tumble down into the abyss. You want to close your eyes, but you can’t, since you still have to guide the horse. You remember the description from the website: “sometimes the horse stumbles, but it always manages to right itself.” You curse the choice of words – “manages” – and rack your brain to remember whether you had read about anyone falling off a cliff to their death on one of these treks.

3. Riding on horseback for 6 hours hurts. It hurts your back, and your butt. It hurts your face when your horse decides to gallop, unprompted, through a thicket of branches. It hurts your bladder when your horse decides to jump from rock to rock.

By the time we arrived at the village, we looked and felt like we had been through war. Our guide showed us our hut. It was actually kind of cute – a Rondavel covered with a thatched roof and patched with branches and twigs. And the scenery was stunning. We were absolutely in the middle of nowhere. Mountains and lush forest for miles, nary a hint of pollution - or any development for that matter. We could hear far away the rumbling of a waterfall. Kids played in the dirt, rolling around a small wheel attached to a stick. It was possibly the most pristine place I had ever seen in my life.

Act II: Maseru Hut and the Battle of the Wild Dogs

When we got back from the waterfall, dusk was setting. After taking a few minutes to stand outside our hut, gawking at the sunset, Mike and I began to unpack. Here, we realized our folly: not only did we not take a flashlight with us, but we had no torches, only 2 candles, and our pack of matches was soaked. The nearest source of electricity was 8 hours away over the mountains… as you can imagine, it soon became quite dark.

After several frantic minutes, Mike and I managed to light one candle. We guarded the candle with our lives, placing it gingerly in a mug to shield it from the gusts that were coming over the side of the mountain.

With the candle situation sorted, we turned to making dinner, using a small Bunsen burner provided by our guide. It was here that I discovered that Michael had, in fact, not been joking about purchasing raw chicken to take with us on our trek. Unfortunately, our chicken braved the overland journey even worse than we had; it had turned into a soggy, festering mess that was made even less appetizing by the fact that we had neglected to purchase any seasonings: not even salt.

So, we were left with sardines.

Truth be told, as we sat under the stars eating our can of sardines, we felt pretty content. We were one with nature, living minimally and cleanly. We stared at the crazy constellations, the sky completely rid of cityglow and pollution, full of dazzlingly bright orbs that flickered above us.

This idyll was not to last. At about 10 pm we climbed back into our hut, spread out our sleeping bags, and blew out our candle. Almost immediately, we began to hear a mournful howl. First one dog, then multiple. They were gathering outside of our hut, scratching at our door, barking over each other.

“The sardines…” Michael whispered to me with dread. In our attempt to leave no trace, we had kept the can inside the hut and now the smell was wafting towards all manner of wildlife that cared to step across the shoddy threshold. Speaking of the hut door – to call it a “door” would be an overstatement. It was, in fact, a thin board that had been lodged haphazardly into the hut cavity, sans latch, sans lock, and sans insulation. In other words, a misshapen 2*4 was separating us and our sardines from a pack of hungry wild dogs.

So began our first sleepless night in Lesotho. By the time it ended, Mike and I had managed to bury our sardines in such a sarcophagus of plastic, paper, and bunched up clothes that I suspect even the dogs lost scent of them. We awoke having slept for 2 hours, and covered in bug bites from the night. Now it was time to head back to Malealea.

Act III: The Return to Malealea

You can imagine the mood Michael and I were in as we packed up our horses and braced for the 6 hour return to camp. “Riding” a horse is a bit of a misnomer… it’s more of an active driving situation, at least with our ponies, and one has to be alert at all times. Alertness, that morning, was not forthcoming.

Nonetheless, after many pony farts, a few rogue runs for pasture, and one terrifying incident where my horse took off down a cliff at full gallop with me braying atop it, we made it back to Malealea Lodge. Michael half-lumbered, half-fell off of his horse, clutching his back and muttering under his breath about how he can’t wait for a shower. I followed suit. We got our key, found our Rondavel and finally… finally… set our things down, took a long, hot shower, and plopped down on the bed, blasting the A/C.

Just kidding, that’s not what happened.

Our hut had no electricity, nor any running water. Michael walked out to inquire why there was no water coming out of the tap, but the workers at Malealea are deaf/mute, and so he didn’t get as far as he would have liked. We sat on the bed looking at each other for a while, and then Michael uttered what had become his phrase of the trip by this point:

“I need a fucking beer.”

And so, we ventured out to the Malealea Lodge main area, which was actually very laid back and nice looking.

And we ordered beer. After beer. After beer. Until we no longer cared that we stank and that we were bitten up and that our butts hurt. Soon we had made friends with some German tourists, a couple from Mozambique, and a scuba instructor from Tanzania. We found out that there was in fact electricity and water – but only between the hours of 6 and 8 pm. We took a shower. All was well with the world.

Act IV: The Great Battle of Mosquito

And so it was in high spirits that we went to bed that night, well-fed, clean, and a little tipsy. There was no electricity by that point, but we had our candle, and the flashlight on Mike’s phone, and so we were content.

Suddenly, I was awoken by a light. Disoriented, I reached out to Michael but he was no longer in bed. As my eyes adjusted I saw him standing in the middle of the room, holding his phone as a torch, and swiping wildly at the air.

“What are you doing?” I asked, groggy.

He was too preoccupied and didn’t seem to hear me.

“Michael?”

“The mosquito. I will. Kill it.”

“What mosquito? There’s a mosquito?”

“Its… buzzing! In my ear!”

“OK…”

I drifted back to sleep for a few minutes.

BAM! I woke up with a start. “What the hell was that?”

Michael was cradling his hand, which had fallen like a misguided missile on the bedside table.

“I missed it…”

“Michael, why don’t you just ignore the mosquito and come back to bed.”

He looked at me, wild eyed, and for the first time I saw the extent of his distress.

“You don’t understand… it’s been flying in my nose. It’s been flying in my ear. It’s buzzing, it won’t leave me alone.”

“OK baby why don’t you wad up some tissue paper and put it in your ears.”

“Tissue paper? Are you kidding me? You don’t understand…”

“OK, well what do you want to do because now I’m awake and you’re not going to catch the mosquito and this sucks.”

“I think I’m going to sleep in the car.”

“What?”

“Yeah. The car. No mosquitoes there.”

“Mike, come here, just get in bed and try to fall asleep OK?”

“OK… ok…”

The phone light went off.

5 minutes later: WHACK! “It’s not…. Faaaaair….”

I have to admit, this was the first time I had ever heard my husband whimper. He sounded so pathetic, so defeated. He was sputtering and wiping his mouth where the mosquito had kamikazied into his teeth. Except kamikazied would be the wrong term, because the fucker was still alive.

“Ok, you know what, you WIN!” he was yelling now, sweating. “You fucking mosquito you win. This is YOUR hut. Take it”

And with that, Mike put a pillow over his face, wrapped himself in a blanket, and, breathing heavily against the suffocating cloth, settled into bed.

Soon, all was quiet.

Then…. “bzzzzzzzz. Bzzzzzz” A quiet, high pitched buzzing. Was I imagining it? No, it was there. Close. Where was it? OUCH! It fucking bit me. SWAT. No dice.

Bzzzzzzz. Bzzzzz. SWAT. “AHA! Gotcha” I thought smugly as I wiped the mosquito remnants off the bed sheet. I settled back into bed.

Bzzzzzz. Bzzzz.

“What the fuck? I thought I killed you.”

I turned on Mike’s phone torch and pointed it at the wall. And there to my horror I saw the real problem: a dozen little black parachute shadows, each corresponding to its own little bloodsucking beast.

I sat down on the bed to assess the situation. Michael and I had a 7-hour drive back to Johannesburg ahead of us the next day. We had slept 2 hours the night before. One of us had to sleep tonight. In what was possibly the kindest and most martyr-like act of my life, I decided it would be him.

And so began the Great Mosquito Battle of 2016. Armed with a rolled up New Yorker, toilet paper in my ears, covered in sweat, I began stalking the perimeter of the room, working by cell phone light. Every time I swatted one mosquito, the others lifted up off the wall in unison and dispersed. One or two would fly in for the kill, buzzing mercilessly around my eyes and ears. The others would retire into the shadows, waiting their turn.

It was a night of great strategy and planning. First, I retired to the bathroom to try to set a trap for the mosquitoes. My plan was to use my body heat, combined with the scent of urine (as I said, the toilet didn’t flush after 10 pm) to lure them into the bathroom, where I would lie waiting to massacre. Sadly the mosquitoes were much too savvy for this decoy, and preferred to stay in the cool main room.

Then, I relocated to the far part of the room, where a creepy single bed was stationed against a window. My plan, again, was to lure the mosquitoes to my side of the room, away from Mike. This plan worked for approximately 30 minutes, until I discovered that I was sharing my bed with the largest cockroach I have ever laid eyes on. The resulting clamor undid all of my hard work and sent the mosquitoes catapulting back to queen bed territory, but miraculously did not wake up Mike.

Finally, I reverted to the stealth attack: I would turn off the light and approach a wall, raising my New Yorker to strike. Then, I would quickly turn on the phone light and surprise the momentarily stunned mosquito with a hearty New Yorker whack. This plan netted approximately 6 mosquito casualties.

In the end, my winged nemeses won our war of attrition. As dawn broke, I settled back into the bed, pulled a pillow over my face, and hoped I would not suffocate.

Epilogue: The Lesotho Border, the Return to Johannesburg, and the Bug Bites

We awoke at 7 a.m., covered in sweat and mosquito bites.

“This is the worst day ever,” Mike said. “I’d ask for a beer already, but I have to drive.”

And with that, we set off for Johannesburg. First, Mike expertly conquered the gravel road that had bedeviled us on the way into Malealea. Next, we got stuck in traffic in downtown Lesotho, where Mike experienced for the first time the very African phenomenon of imaginary lanes. You don’t like your lane? Too much traffic? No problem, just form another one, on the sidewalk, the median, or in oncoming traffic!

“Are they… serious?” was a common refrain during this period.

As we finally approached the Lesotho border, the line of cars crawled to a standstill. We inched forward for two hours, yard by yard, valiantly fighting off imaginary lane-dwellers who decided to re-approach reality by cutting in front of our car.

As we approached the border, we caught site of a long line of pedestrians snaking towards the Lesotho-South Africa crossing. Ladies in bright dresses, young men laden with suitcases and cardboard boxes of goods, children, goats…. All baking under the hot sun. The car line was inching along faster than the pedestrian line, and so some pedestrians decided to pursue a logical option: ask to get into the cars and ride across the border.

We watched as the first brave pedestrians – a group of two middle-aged women in flowing red dresses- climbed over the barrier separating the lines, and approached a car in front of us. After a bit of negotiation and laughter, the ladies successfully climbed into the back. This heartened the rest of the group and soon hordes of people were running to the cars. The conversion rate seemed to be about 50%. Rightly or wrongly, we decided not to pick up any hitchhikers. We didn’t know the context, didn’t know the language, and we were the only white people for miles – we didn’t want to give the border guards any more reason to single us out or shake us down.

And so, we approached the border post alone, and after some negotiation related to obtaining exit stamps, we were finally back in South Africa. Five hours, many red bulls, and a truly incredible amount of biltong later, we were back in Johannesburg.

As a final word – we thought our misadventure had ended with the safe return of our rental car, but alas we had acquired an unwanted lingering gift. In the coming days, our bug bites became progressively worse, and a week later, Mike and I were both so completely covered in bites that we again couldn’t sleep because of all of the itching. We never did find out what the hell had bitten us, and was continuing to bite us long after we left Lesotho. Dermatologists ruled out bed bugs, mites, and scabies (yes, at one point we considered the possibility of scabies) and instead hooked us up with massive amounts of steroids that have all but healed the bites. Still, three weeks later, I remain a bit itchy.

And so, what have we learned from this adventure? We learned that Lesotho is absolutely stunningly beautiful. We learned we should think more about what we pack and about logistics. We learned never to get on a horse again.

I’m glad to have this trip in the rear view. I’ll chalk it up to one of those experiences that I’m glad to have had, but might not be repeating soon… at least not without a flashlight and some DEET.