Day 5: Wednesday - Sani Pass and LesothoWe left the campground at 06:00 without breakfast. I promised Sally we would stop for breakfast once we had passed the border post.
The twin peaks in the distance heralded the Sani Pass, gateway to the mountain kingdom of Lesotho:
We turned left onto the Sani Pass road and after a few minutes were relieved to find the tarmac reverted to gravel - they had not yet tarred the road.
Further up we saw a dome tent and bicycle - the same guy who had been sleeping at the garage yesterday. Cycling this far was one thing - cycling all the way up the pass would be a real challenge, not just due to the altitude, but the road surface, not ideal for a road bike:
We arrived at the border control - no problems here:
Now we start heading up the lower reaches of the pass:
The pass beckons in the distance:
Further up the pass the track deteriorated. At its best people have driven crossover SUVs up this road. Although not visible in this picture, following the recent heavy rains, the Land Cruiser only just had enough ground clearance in places - the gravel and sand having been washed away leaving a surface consisting of rocks ranging in size from baseballs to footballs. Also, the rain had washed channels up to 12 inches deep in places. Even with the good axle articulation of the Land Cruiser and excellent tyres there were parts where traction was lost causing the chunka-chunka-chunka of the axle alternately gripping and slipping, putting a lot of snatch loading on the UJs and drive shafts. I stopped and engaged rear diff lock to reduce these damaging loads - this was not somewhere I wanted to break a transmission component.
I would have taken a photo, but at this point I was rather busy driving :B
All the way up the pass we leap-frogged a party of 3 in a 4x4. They were a couple on a guided bird-watching tour up the pass into Lesotho with a private guide. Sally recognised the couple as having been in one of our earlier campgrounds in the Drakensberg. We did notice that they were wearing the matching (and brand new) safari gear - it always reminds me of Sally's stories of skiing with the army - she said you could recognise the wealthy but inexperienced skiers in the Alps back then because they had what the army referred to as "All the gear but no idea", often fashionably matching ski gear in the latest colours and styles.
At the top you are supposed to stop at the border post, but it wasn't actually easy to get to it, since the whole road was being dug up and replaced, and was a sea of mud navigated by fleets of Chinese construction trucks:
We parked a bit further on and tiptoed across the mud trying not to get run over. You are not allowed to take alcohol into Lesotho, you have to buy it in country. I knew I still had a bottle of beer left in the fridge that I hadn't got around to drinking, but it seemed pointless declaring it just to add to the paperwork. The border official simply asked if we had anything to declare - I don't think he was too keen to wade through mud to go and inspect our dirty vehicle. We paid our vehicle immigration fee and he stamped our passports and gave us a receipt:
Next to the border control was a vehicle, probably dragged there as a warning of the dangers of the pass when not driven appropriately:
Sally found a shop and bought a souvenir. I paid with the genuine Lesotho bank note I had received as change from the border official. The Lesotho currency is pegged 1:1 with the ZAR and the store holder was used to seeing white tourists with pocket fulls of the latter, so was very surprised we had the local currency. I instantly regretted paying with that note - it would have made a great souvenir - quite a rare piece of currency to own.
As we drove away from the border the bird watching guide came rushing to catch up in his car, flashing his lights. I pulled over - he was worried because he didn't see us at the border post. Rightly he pointed out that had we failed to get our passports stamped we could have had a rough time trying to get back out of the country in a few days time.
He pulled over to photograph some birds, and we continued on our way into the heart of Lesotho. It was late summer, but the altitude left snow on the highest peaks:
The road construction was considerable and probably stretched the entire width of the country.
The locals were immediately evident in their gum boots, blankets and balaclava helmets to ward off the cold (even though it was hot today), often riding horses, complete with English saddle and tack in pretty good condition.
We finally stopped for breakfast:
Below us the old met the new. The new being Chinese supplied trucks, often driven by Chinese drivers. The Chinese are clearly funding this road construction - the question is, what is in it for them; raw materials probably. I suspect there will be some open cast mines appearing in Lesotho soon:
Barrels, presumably holding tar:
A new stretch of steel-reinforced concrete highway take shape:
A little further on we reached our turn-off, and were back on gravel road - however, this was pretty poor road compared to the fast gravel roads of South Africa. After a while I started to consider 30 km/h to be fast:
I had expected it to take longer to get to this point, so had marked a couple of lodges here as potential overnight camping spots. However, it was midday. Plus Sally had noticed that here the children did rush out to beg, and suspected that camping here, attracting many curious children with little hands keen to find an interesting souvenir. It would likely be extra tiring after a long day of driving to be dealing with hoards of friendly children.
We decided to continue and I set the GPS for Katse Dam, our proposed camping point for the following night. I didn't have any details for camping anywhere between here and there, so hoped the 150km of dirt road would be better than the last few km we crawled along at 30km/h. I was wrong.
More wrecked cars - stripped of any useful parts:
Several hours later, a check on the clock and GPS showed that we had only achieved 30km/h on the best bits of road, and on others had achieved only 10km/h. The GPS showed the last 50km of road to the dam was wigglyer than the road we had already been on - this didn't bode well for getting there before sunset, and this wasn't a great place to drive in the dark - I suspect all these car wrecks were a result of night driving.
It occurred to me that I had chosen a dirt track that joined a pair of villages either side of a mountain pass, but each village tended to only communicate with the bigger settlements in the other direction, not with the other village. So the road in between the two was in appalling shape. At one point a team of locals was working with a backhoe excavator which was blocking most of the road. We crawled around it on low ratio first (and on a Land Cruiser 78 that is much much lower than low first on my Ford pickup truck). Again, the road looked like a dried river bed tilted at a steep angle, but the car coped.
My truck camper would not have coped. Low first on my truck would have been far too high and the camper would have been thrown around so much it would have torn the tie-downs out.
Suddenly out of no-where a stretch of brand new highway - this is fantastic. It lasted about half a km before it reverted to dirt road again:
Big weather was starting to threaten, and we had a bit of rain. I didn't want to be on these mud roads when the heavens opened full bore, and didn't want to be crossing one of those rivers either.
We eventually reached the end of the dirt road at the first proper town since entering the country - Thaba Tseka. The place was packed and looked like a place where you wanted a secure compound to park in. It was close to sunset so we decided the best bet was to find a hotel, We passed one on the main street with a secure enclosure filled with Toyota Hilux with various agency names printed on the side - regional development, aid, etc. The receptionist said they were fully booked though - this was clearly the best hotel in town. But she recommended another hotel down the hill in a quieter part of town next to a car wash - Strangely Lesotho (and South Africa) is full of car washes - the manual type with a tin shed and a couple of guys washing cars by hand. Every car on the road, apart from ours, which by now was a national disgrace, was immaculate and shiny. Having a shiny car was clearly a status symbol and a highly valuable item to be looked after with great care.
This hotel looked fairly new. It was pricey, but well appointed:
The weather soon deteriorated:
and we were glad we weren't attempting to camp that night as a massive thunderstorm swept the town. It was followed by the perfect rainbow, but unfortunately my camera lens wasn't wide enough to capture the whole thing:
The hotel room was comfortable; it had a TV showing 3 channels (all from South Africa, not Lesotho) and was packed with heaters indicating how cold it gets here in winter:
We each had a shower and then had dinner in the hotel restaurant, which was busy. It was also equipped with a stereo for which they had just discovered the wonder that was the subwoofer, and were making the most of it having turned its sub-bass control all the way to the right - it did sort of ruin the atmosphere.
Katse Dam tomorrow? No. I think we have had enough of bad roads for the moment, and decide to luxuriate in sealed roads through the rest of the country. We also decided to bank the extra day we had gained and use it later in the trip.
Stay tuned for our return to South Africa...
