Lesotho

We spent the past three days in Lesotho (pronounced Le-soo-too), a tiny mountainous country which has only one border (it is surrounded by South Africa on all sides). The country is a combination of 20th century technology and 10th century traditions. I believe that we were the only car going across the border at the time. Everyone else walked across and someone lifted the gate boom to let our little Volkswagen through. We arrived in a thunderstorm and were right in the middle of the lightning. I watched a bolt strike the ground about 25 metres in front of me. Another bolt was so close that we were debating whether or not we'd been hit. What does it feel like to be in a vehicle struck by lightning? I don't know but since the electrical system seemed to be working fine, we decided that it must have been just "close".

Two hours later we crossed through a mountain pass on a dirt road seemingly in the middle of nowhere and arrived at our destination, the Malealea Lodge. This tourist lodge supports the local community by employing them as tour guides and helps build schools in the community & things like wells & HIV/AIDS Projects. Lesotho has one of the highest incident rates of HIV/AIDS in the world (like Namibia) & this is evident only in the copious graveyards & the nice funeral signs & buildings (some of the nicest buildings in the country, although the HIV centres also seemed nice too). It's also the only place I've visited so far that encouraged visitors to offset the carbon they used to reach the village by helping to plant trees in the community. Most of the locals are already carbon-neutral since donkeys/horses produce no GHG and the lodge is the only place in town with electricity (from 5PM to 10PM only). We watched the local choir perform and saw the homemade instruments used by the local band (oil cans, string, and scrap wood). A five-hour horseback ride through the countryside gave us a pretty good impression of how the locals live: farming and shepherding.

We helped a girl who'd broken her ankle and I was not envious of the trip she was going to be taking to the nearest hospital: four hours back to Bloomfontein in South Africa would not be pleasant. We were pretty careful with our footing after that.
In general, a beautiful place to visit but I was happy to be back in the "safety" of South Africa last night.