#mokhotlong

The bartender was laughing at me.  Math is one of my strong suits.  I could not make my bills add to 30, and then when I tried to overcompensate that, I made them add to 70.  The bartender wanted to help me.  I told him, “Wow, I am blowing it.  I have been drinking beer all day.”  He said, “And you are have been doing a great job of it.”

I am drunk.  It is not late…  Let me have a look.  Holy, it is only 19:02.  I decided to go on an all day bender.  It has been a while since I have been on one of those.

I will get into how this day started, but first, let me explain, that I really felt like getting shitfaced all day.  I do not feel mentally drunk, though my math skills would dictate otherwise, but I sure can feel it when I walk.  Though, I can type like I invented the keyboard patter right now.

When in the highest pub in Africa…

It has just been a super long time since I just felt so comfortable in a place to just let my guard down and get smashed.  Right now, I am on the top of Africa.  Really.  I am in the highest pub in all of Africa.  I am at Sani Pass, which is in Lesotho, but it is actually on the South African side of the border.  I came here because someone advertised to me that it was the tallest pub in Africa.  I had also heard how beautiful it was.  Now, I am on a runaway.

It is just a really cool pub. It is safe. It is comfortable. There is a fireplace burning the right side of my face and they have a place for me to sleep not far away.  This place, the Sani Lodge, is just too cozy.  The staff is great, good music plays, and when is the last time you got to hang out by an open fireplace?

I paid manager Brian, a really nice man, for the last bed available about four hours ago. I have not bothered to check into the room or take my bag out of reception.  I will jump that hurdle later.  Staff will either think I am funny, or a nightmare, when they have to help me to find my bed.  Either way, life is a blast right now.

  I befriended her on my walk. And then she gave me this pose. This is her rondavel, including satellite dish accessory.

I woke up in a guesthouse on the side of a hill in a place where I have no idea where I was and I could probably never find it again.  It was where a semi dropped me off last night.  When I woke up, the South African father, wife and daughter were already awake.  But, not only were they awake, but in my slumber they had taken care of me!  As I unknowingly walked from my room towards the outside to see if life existed, I noticed that there was a plate in the kitchen area of the house where we were staying at. On it was a piece of toast that was holding up bacon and a cooked egg.  I hoped that I was in the presence of wonderful humans who might be the kind of people who might cook breakfast for a stranger they did not know, but knew of his existence by his late night arrival…

Yeah, this is the inside of her rondavel. I had no idea that the insides of these places could ever be so nice.

Well, life is wonderful and it is full of great humans that take care of other humans.  As I went to visit with the father and the daughter on the terrace, the mother came to me with a plate (the one I had spied) and told me she had prepared breakfast.  Had it not been too forward, I would have kissed her on the cheek for such a gesture.  Wow, I love people who are in tune with the awesomeness of life!  They are not everywhere, but when they appear they shine like Sirius who wins the battle in the sky every single night.

Mmmm. Chicken feet breakfast at this house!..

I chatted with my new friends until 10:00 and realized I needed to get moving if I was to cause a ruckus somewhere tonight.  So, I walked to a road to try my thumb at hitchhiking…unsuccessfully.  There were not cars going my way on Easter Sunday.  Church was apparently not the way I was heading.  So, I used the only other means necessary that I had at my disposal…a pair of “The Who” edition Union Jack Converse shoes.  We walked for about four kilometers until a deep valley and up the other side.  Going down is always nice.  Going up is always so bad that it if going down is a +10, then going up is a -15 on the 10-scale.  It sucks and you are left with a -5 overall from your experience which is actually enough to denounce half of the happiness that going down offered.  Then, you have to also deduct a -10 of spread and you realize that dealing with valleys with a huge backpack ranks bad enough on the suck-scale that if it were a sports player, you would trade it from your team.

Hiking this entire road because no one was driving on Easter Sunday.

When I eventually reached a t-intersection that would give me the option of going into the town of Mokhotlong or going to Sani Pass instead, I hitchhiked a ride to Sani Pass with a really lovely woman and her family.  I am not sure what was going on, but she was driving and her husband was in the back seat.  A woman driving her husband has never happened once in the history of time in Africa.  He must have done something really bad…

So awesome…

We stopped in a village on the way and as I was sitting in the van and waiting for the family to come back from what they were doing. A pick-up truck of drunk Easter celebrators pulled up so close to us in a hurry that it smashed mirrors with the one on the driver’s side of the van I was in.  The driver got out and he was apologizing to me.  It had nothing to do with me, but his eyes were glossy.  Now, being drunk and driving is one thing, but being glossy-eyed and driving is another.  His passengers all had bottles of beer in their hands when they got out.  They offered me a ride to Sani Pass.  I declined. They apologized to the lady who owned the van.  She was care-free because her mirror had not smashed.

The lady drove me to Sani Pass which is right on the border with South Africa.  There is the highest pub in Africa there and apparently a backpacker hostel which I guess I will make it to at some point.  I decided to have a beer and a bite to eat.  The views were so nice and I talked a lot of nonsense to everyone who showed up at my busy table. I was enjoying myself so much that I decided to have more beer.  After four, everyone in the place seemed to like me.

I decided that I just wanted to get smashed.  In the middle of this decision, I figured that I needed to go down Sani Pass on the South African side as it is supposed to be one of the craziest drives in the world.  Immigration did not even stamp my passport as I said I would be returning, and they let me carry my beer through.  I have not crossed through immigration with a beer in my hand hassle free in my life. I even made the immigration officer take a photo of me doing the deed.  He liked my enthusiasm.

So, he is playing a bucket, attached to a handle with a wire strung on it, and the bow is a twig with string across it. Wow!

I hitchhiked my way down a very very crazy road, said hello to some sheppards, and then hitchhiked back up.  It was an impressively scary road to be in a vehicle in.   Actually, it was dangerous on my feet as I walked down it before I caught a ride.

The Sani Pass road. It is supposedly one of the tightest hair-pin curved roads in the world.

When I got back to the place where I had come up with the idea to hitchhike down and up, I started drinking a lot more beer, and, here we are…  I have to go.  There are people around that I should probably befriend.

Talk to you tomorrow! Your friend, Beaver

  Quite an upgrade from a dorm bed. The perks of charm, getting smashed and travel journalism.

Update:  I was the last person to leave the bar.  As I was to head to my room, a manager Brian told me that they had moved me to another room, one closer to the building we were in.  I said, “See Brian, if a man sits in a bar all day and drinks beer, life just has a way of working out!”  A porter walked me to ‘Unit #1’ and when we arrived I was not in a dorm, but rather a super nice housing unit for myself.  It had a really nice bed and a shower with four towels (believe me, you take note of how many towels are available when you realize you left yours behind in Swaziland), and a couch!  A couch!  That was a very nice treat.  I never sat on it, but had I wanted to, it was there!

This is Lesotho.

I caught a 6 rand ($0.39) from Roma to a junction called St. Michaels.  The mini-van sped off again and I walked up to a group of men standing beside a mini-van that was broken down.  Obviously, I was out of place and one of the men recognized so and curiously asked me where I was going.  I told him I was on my way to Mokhotlong, which was directly on the other side of the country.  He told me that I was much better off to take the road that went north (the thick line on the map) and to go all the way around.  He said that would be much easier.  I told him easy is boring.  He told me that it was going to take me, “Three or four days,” on the road I wanted to take.  It might not be much of a road, but I knew it would not take three or four days.  I have become keen to the fact that Africans have no concept of distance versus time…ever…

“Don’t go here,” they said. “The road is too long,” they said.

A bus came along that said “Thaba Teska” in the front window.  Thaba Tseka was more than half way across.  I stopped the bus and climbed on.  80 rand ($5.17) for the journey.  I asked the conductor when we would arrive.  He told me at 13:00.  We would get there at 15:00…

[su_pullquote]Part of the drive was through a place called “God Help Me Pass.”[/su_pullquote]The journey was great.  The bus was full of locals wrapped in traditional blankets, some of them drinking beer at 10:45 in the morning.  The views were stunning as we cut right through the mountains of the heart of Lesotho.  You cannot ever let someone influence you away from something that you are sure you are capable of doing.  You know you best.  Had I listened to the man on the road where I caught the bus, I would have quickly traveled down a highway and missed the beauty that was before my eyes here.  Other people are always sure they know what is best for you, but they do not.  They do not know what you are really looking for when they spew out their opinion.  They only know what they are not looking for and assume you are going to feel the exact same way about everything they feel.  So, they encourage you to miss something amazing so that you can have the comfort they prefer.  The drive from Roma to Mokhotlong would be one of the most beautiful drives of my life…

Harrows? I am not sure what my bus conductor is doing here.

When travelling, everything everywhere is interesting, but what has truly come to light in Africa is that if you want to see truly fascinating life, you need to get off the main roads when you travel.  Off of the main road and on the rough trails connecting villages is where you will find:

– donkeys pulling carts – villages of round huts that say “Africa” to you – men on horseback wrapped in traditional blankets, wearing balaclavas to stay warm – restaurant businesses in campers with no wheels on them, set up in a circle around a makeshift bus station – beautiful mountains with terraces cut into them where people have planted crops of maize or sorghum – collapsed bridges with people having picnics at one of the ends – men on horseback transporting crates of beer – stopping the mini-van-taxi on the side of the road to hand a huge bag of flour to a man on horseback who throws it over his lap and carries it home

Like someone drew the perfect river.

In Thaba Tseka, I got off the bus and squeezed into a small yellow mini-van-taxi that the driver said would take me to Mokhotlong for 54 rand ($3.50).  I asked him how long that would take.  He said it was a three hour journey.  Four hours later we stopped at a fork in a dirt road where the driver told me to get out and I would catch another taxi to take me to Mokhotlong as my driver was going another way.  We were in the middle of the countryside, cattle around, a stream nearby and a small concrete bridge that allowed vehicles to pass was the only indication that other humans had ever been there before.  This was where I was supposed to wait for a taxi?  Wow…  I knew there was a village a couple of kilometers back that we had passed through, so if worst came to worst, I could walk back there and try to find a place to sleep.  My mini-van-taxi man said that he would wait until a ride came for me.  Oh!  Good!

Gorgeous little village.

I had been sharing my pipe and tobacco with a man who had also been riding in the mini-van-taxi when a semi-truck came along about 10 minutes later.  I could see the two men inside smiling.  My taxi driver went to talk to them and came back to tell me that I could get into the semi with the two men, and for 50 rand ($3.25), they would take me the rest of the way to Mokhotlong.  Good enough for me.  I climbed into the semi and introduced myself.

Well, the semi guys turned out to be really cool.  I remembered that I had a couple of beers in my bag, so I got them out, and the semi passenger and I drank them while smoking my pipe.  The guys in the semi were grinning and laughing at their luck of this hitchhiker they had picked up.

Drinking beer and teaching Lesotho men how to smoke a pipe in a semi-truck as we drove on really rough roads though the mountains in the middle of Lesotho. Life is so awesome.

The road was one of the worst I have been on in my life.  For 15 kilometers, we drove at a speed less than walking because the road was so bad.  Once we made it through that mountain pass, we got to a smooth section again where we could make up time.

At 21:00, we were only a few kilometers outside of Mokhotlong when the passenger told me that he knew of a guesthouse.  So, we stopped on the side of the road, I put on my backpack and we walked in the dark for about a half of a kilometer through some pasture.  I am not even kidding.  I wondered where we were going.  There were no lights anywhere to represent that there might be a home for me to sleep anywhere.  We had come quite a distance down from the road where I could see the truck parked far above us.  Eventually, some buildings appeared, but there was no light coming from them.  It did not look like a guesthouse to me.  We made our way to the front door and knocked.  A white man opened the door in his underwear.  Where was I?

It turned out that the man who had opened the door was also a guest staying with his family.  He said that the people who rent out the place were in bed, but that there was one vacant room left.  I shook hands with my friend who had brought me to this point and he headed off into the night to get back to his truck.  I followed the white man to a room.

I took this in the morning, but this is the bed I ended up with in the middle of a pasture in Lesotho!

A big bed covered in a nice blanket with fluffy pillows at the headboard and there was an attached bathroom.  The room was incredibly nice.  The man pointed to the lantern on a small stove in the corner of the room and asked me if I had matches.  At that point, I realized there was no electricity where we were.  Well, that made sense…  I told him I had a lighter, thanked him and he left me to go back to his room.  I washed my face, undressed and crawled into a bed that was so perfect and so soft that I am not sure how it managed to get to this country.