There be Dragons...

Hello again!

Picking up the thread from my last posting, we rejoin Grant and me on a Sunday morning in Durban, waiting around for the Baz Bus. Yes, I was back on the Baz again. Mostly because the day's destination, the Amphitheatre Backpackers, is up in the Northern Drakensberg, a fair old drive from the nearest town, but is a designated Baz stop. It's a quirky little place, and one with which I was already familiar, having stayed there on my previous visit to South Africa, and done the magnificent Tugela Falls walk (well, at times it was more of a climb...).

One aspect of the Baz which I can't fault is the ease of meeting those who are likely to be your companions for the next few days. In this case, Grant and I were joined by Kulraj, a British guy who (slightly similar to my original plans) was on unpaid leave from his company and off seeing the world, and an American lass from Minnesota, who went by the unlikely name of Betta. Turns out, as I should have guessed, this was just another of the many quirky ways of abbreviating Elizabeth (it's at least as logical a contraction as Libby, put it that way). She did provide endless amusement for the next few days, though, as Kulraj would wind her up by continually responding to things "yeah, you betcha!" - this is apparently something of a Minnesota thing. At any rate, she took it all in good spirit.

Arriving at the Backpackers mid-afternoon, it was obviously too late to get anything significant done that day, so we ended up just sitting around chatting, exchanging travellers' tales, for a while. In the evening, it was over to the restaurant/bar area, which is in what is effectively a vey big rondavel (the thatched round houses favoured by many of the tribes in South Africa) for dinner and a few drinks, as well as discussions on what to do the next day. There were a couple of other English couples there as well, whose names I have to admit I've forgotten now, all bar the fact that one of the girls was called George. The general consensus, unfortunately for me, was that almost everyone wanted to do the Tugela Falls walk. Which was understandable, as it is an amazing day-trip. I had been hoping to do the trip up to Lesotho which they also run, and had to make do with the prospect of going the following day, the Tuesday, which would unfortunately cut somewhat into my planned time in Jo'burg and Pretoria.

As it was, though, I got up around the same time as the others on the Monday morning (which can be nigh-on unavoidable when everybody else in your dorm is getting up), and was mooching around when the news came through: there was too much cloud over the section of the Amphitheatre where the Falls walk goes, and they had to cancel for that day. So, suddenly, the Lesotho trip was back on, and I was haring around like a decapitated chook trying to get my stuff together. Having dug out my camera, fleece, water bottle etc, Grant, Betta and I, along with the non-George English couple and a French couple who were also at the hostel, piled into the 4WD with our driver, whose name I now scandalously cannot remember, and we were off.

Our journey took us over the Provincial border between KwaZulu-Natal and Free State, as the crossing into Lesotho (pronounced Le-SOO-too) was somewhat further around the border. This might seem strange, given that Lesotho lay just the other side of the the Drakensberg range, which is visible from the hostel. However, you have to bear in mind that at this point it is an escarpment - effectively a long series of cliffs rather than a gentle set of foothills leading up into peaks - and there are very few crossings along the southern and eastern borders of Lesotho. The famous Sani Pass, further south down the Drakensberg, is one of the few which is passable to vehicle traffic. We were headed for another, which is actually on the north-eastern border of Lesotho, near to the vast community of QwaQwa.

No, I'm not making that name up. QwaQwa (pronounced Kwah-Kwah, but with one of the distinctive glottal "clicks" of the isiZulu and isiXhosa languages on the "K") is a real place, and it's a real big place. In fact, it's the largest settlement in Free State and quite a bit bigger than Bloemfontein, the provincial capital and 3rd national capital. Yes, they officially have a Legislative Capital (Cape Town, where the Parliament sits), an Executive Capital (Pretoria, where the Civil Service is based) and a Judicial Capital (Bloemfontein, where the Supreme Court sits). It's one of those lovely compromises South Africa just seems to work with, which anywhere else would be a recipe for chaos. Despite being the largest and richest city, Johannesburg is not, and never has been, a capital of South Africa. At any rate, QwaQwa, which grew out of yet another of the apartheid government's attempts to create black "homelands" and dump those not needed for industry there, is apparently now the 5th most populous urban area in the country (behind Jo'burg, Cape Town, Durbs and PE), but you're hard-pressed even to find it mentioned in any guidebook. Effectively, it's a giant township, but without the usual White South African city that generally provides the focus (and much of the employment) for the occupants. And, up on the cliffs above the southern end of this vast sprawl, at the end of an "unsealed road" (i.e. a track) which skirts up the side of the mountain with little or nothing in the way of safety barriers between vehicles and a vertiginous drop, lies probably South Africa's smallest border crossing.

After approaching up the afore-mentioned track, the prospective visitor to Lesotho passes through a wire-link fence and stops next to a small building containing a couple of officials from the Immigration department. I think they did have a computer up there, but it wasn't working that day, so our exit formalities were processed manually and, for the first time in about a month, I was headed into a new African country. As we passed through the wire-link fence on the other side of the South African border compound, I was expecting to find a Lesotho counterpart, but the track just headed down a valley and up the other side. When I asked him, our driver responded that the Lesotho post was a bit farther down the road.

Which it was, kind of. You see, the Lesotho border post consisted of a couple of caravans at the side of the road, one for immigration and one for customs. Both were empty. Apparently Lesotho wasn't bothering with its borders along this way at the moment, and was happy to leave it in the hands of the South Africans. In fact, the Customs caravan looked on the verge of collapse. It was an interesting welcome to Africa's highest country. A country that was also in the interesting (some would say damned uncomfortable) position of being, for many years, a Black African state completely enclosed by the apartheid Republic of South Africa.

The reasons for its independence basically go back (again) to the times of the British Empire, and the fact that the lands of the Sotho (or Basotho) people, under their King, submitted to the British separately from the Boers and were not engulfed in the manner of the Xhosa and the Zulu - unlike the latter two, the British never made any real attempts at colonising the areas the Sotho called home, and the majority of the conflicts they had had were with the Boers. Hence, like the Tswana people who lived in what was known as Bechuanaland (and became Botswana) and the Swazis, they stayed under direct British rule rather than become part of the Union of South Africa which was formed in the early 20th century. This also meant that they got their independence back as part of the steady implosion of the Empire after World War Two, and were not left totally at the mercy of the National Party. However, like all of the so-called Frontline States of the apartheid years, they were forced to be pragmatic to a certain extent, as South Africa controlled all land and air routes into and out of the country.

At any rate, though spared the iniquities of apartheid, Lesotho remained (and to a large extent still remains) a poor, predominantly agricultural country. There are differences between Lesotho and the majority-Black areas of rural South Africa, but they're not terribly pronounced. Like the Namibian dollar, the Lesotho currency is pegged 1-to-1 to the Rand, and their economy depends almost entirely on their large neighbour. At one point in the day, we saw an army barracks further over in a valley - the fact that Lesotho has an army at all is faintly ridiculous, as the only country they would ever practically be engaged in a struggle with is SA, and the SA Defence Force would swat the Lesotho Defence Force without breaking up a sweat. Cynics would suggest the soldiers are only there for the ego of the government, and as a more heavily-armed alternative to the police in case of civil disorder. And they'd probably be right...

Our agenda for the day featured walking up some hills ("No" proclaimed my knees, still sore from Zululand) to go and see some Bushman (Khoi-Khoi or Khoi-San, if you're being particular) rock art; going and seeing around a local school (to which a donation is made as part of each trip cost); seeing a sangoma (how original...); trying the local food and beer; and generally being gob-smacked by the stark mountain countryside.

The hill-climbing wasn't as bad as I'd feared, and it was, as ever, interesting to see a few more examples of rock art, in this case getting that slightly naughty warm and fuzzy feeling that very few tourists of any stripe had been up here (as far as I know, Amphitheatre runs the only tours up into this part of the country). I know that probably sounds contradictory, given my rant in previous postings about travellers obsessed with getting "off the beaten track", and, if I'm honest, it probably is. I guess I can be as competitive as the next person about what I have or haven't seen on my travels. At any rate, the exercise will have done me good. Which is what I always seem to end up saying when I have to exert myself remotely. 3 years driving a desk obviously made me even lazier than I thought.

After our little climb, it was back down to see around the school, shown around by the headmistess (an ex-pupil). Again, this gave the kind of perspective that middle-class white kids really do need hammered into them sometimes. Just seeing the facilities (or lack thereof) makes you realise, once again, everything we take for granted. The kids were happy to have the chance to be at school. The behaviour puts a lot of the spoilt litte hellions back in the UK utterly to shame. They were both grateful and proud to show off the desks that the visits from backpackers at Amphitheatre down the years had paid for. And they showed us the original school building, which, like several of the others, the pupils at the time had helped to build. Simultaneously heart-warming and heart-breaking.

After that, the sangoma was predictable and just a little bit boring. Having heard variations on the theme from both the Xhosa and the Zulu, I came perilously close to following my old practice from Uni and dozing off in lectures. The food was also predictable, being chunks of mielie with spinach. I've never been that fond of spinach, and eating it repeatedly with mielie certainly hasn't made me any more receptive to its dubious charms. And the beer was something of an experience. You see, this isn't like the ubiquitous Castle lager or anything, this is old-fashioned sorghum stuff. Fermented and served in what looked suspiciously like an old paint tin. The taste was, well, interesting. Comparing it to common or pub-variety beer is a bit like comparing half-fermented scrumpy to modern draught cider, only that helf-fermented beer doesn't have the saving grace of being produced from fruit. I did end up having a second swig as the communal pot went around, though. Just to be sure, you know...?

After that, it was getting on through the afternoon, so we headed back up through the non-existent border post (I was faintly annoyed at that, as I'd have liked to add another stamp to my passport), down through QwaQwa and back over to the backpacker lodge, where we had quite a nice dinner, accompanied by a "Bob Marley" cocktail, and then proceeded to liberally sample some local beer they had on draught (and rather a nice Porter it was, too). And then it was off to bed, as the next day it was time to head north again.

But that can wait for the next posting. Until then, fare well.

Pat