26 Mar Lesotho — Crashing the Border. Also, a Marriage

On the big World Map in fifth grade, Lesotho looked like nothing so much as a hole in South Africa, as if the bigger country hadn’t entirely formed yet. Which, in a way, it hadn’t. Decades later, I drove over and checked it out with my army buddy, Mike.

We’d met at Ft Ord after recovering from unfortunate experiences in Vietnam, kept in touch through bad marriages, good divorces, discovering the ladies we should have married in the first place and, now, he was coming to visit Peggy and me in Botswana.

Looking back, I’m not sure visiting Lesotho was at the top of Mike’s bucket list. Most people go to Africa for the elephants and hippos and rhinos, none of which live in Lesotho. But I was the one with the car keys, and I’d already been to the tourist places, and I wanted to go to Lesotho, and what did Mike know, anyway? He didn’t even live in Africa. So off we headed.

“Don’t go to Lesotho,” people in Botswana told us, “they’ll hit you with sticks.” And the Batswana knew what they were talking about. The Basotho have an entire martial art built around hitting people with sticks.

In the1820’s when Zulu armies were running wild in the eastern provinces of what’s now South Africa, the Basotho retreated into the mountains and, I’ve always imagined, defended themselves with sticks. Fifty years later the Boers, carrying more modern weapons, did such a thorough job of conquering what remained of the non-mountainous parts of Lesotho that, now, the country is all highlands. 

 

 

The first night, Mike and I crashed with a Peace Corps country director Peggy served with. The plan was for the three of us to rappel down a waterfall he knew about. The fact that we never got there had a lot to do with a quart of Jack Daniels but, mostly, it was that his wife refused to come to Lesotho. Not because she was spooked by Africa, Africa was where they’d met. But because she had to take care of her mother. Then, once her mother died, the dog needed her.

This had a familiar ring. Mike and I poured the whiskey and reminisced about marriages from hell and divorces from heaven. The night wore on, the Jack Daniels ran low and, the next morning, our host announced he wouldn’t be rappelling down any waterfalls with us. There may have been a hangover involved in that decision but, looking back, I suspect he had business to attend to. In any event, very shortly thereafter he returned to America, divorced his wife, found the love of his life and moved to St Augustine.

Which was just as well with Mike and me. Shed of the burden of having to rappel down a waterfall and, our corporal work of mercy done, we set out along a mountainous, two-lane road that

 

 

started out paved, but turned to gravel as it headed into the mountains.

And Lesotho is all mountains. Thanks to the Zulus and the Boers, the place has the highest low point of any country in the world. You can go to Nepal. Or Bhutan. Or Tibet, or any of the Andean countries, and get lower than you can in Lesotho. Which means that, in Lesotho, you wind up looking over the edge at things a lot.

 

 

It’s pretty country,

 

 

and rugged

.

 

and much of what you see looks more like the Africa of a hundred years ago

  

 

than anything you’d see in most places today, only in a high-altitude

 

 

Lesotho-ish sort of way.

Like mountain people everywhere, Lesothans take pride themselves on being tough.

 

 

Guys really do whack each with sticks for fun. Even little girls are feistier than you’d expect, which Mike and I discovered when a seven-year-old on her way home from school bent over, flipped up her skirt, pulled down her pants, and mooned us.

In Lesotho, women do

 

 

what women all over Africa

 

have done

 

 

since the dawn of people. And men do what men are apt to do

 

 

when they can get away with it.

As the road climbed into the mountains, the gravel thinned out and turned to dirt.

 

 

And the dirt to mud from moisture condensing out of air rising off the Indian Ocean. And, in season, snow.

Mike and I didn’t encounter any snow. We were there in March, so it was still summer. But we did spend the night in, of all places, 

 

 

Africa’s only ski resort.

The next morning, circling around the northern end of the country, we arrived at a pretty little rock shelter that must have caught the attention of whoever lived there thousands of years ago, because the wall was

 

 

covered with petroglyphs.

 

 

One of the things that has always intrigued me about petroglyphs is how much they look like each other. To my untrained eye, these could have been in Lascaux or along the sides of Nine Mile Canyon in Utah.

Something else that caught my attention is how much the animals

 

 

looked like cows. So, maybe, the petroglyphs weren’t as old as I’d imagined. Or, maybe, they were, but it’s hard to think what other large animals could have shown up on that wall. Elephants and hippos and rhinos don’t frequent mountains so, in Lesotho, African wildlife is all about birds.

Mike and I spent our last night back with Peggy’s buddy, tossed down what was left of the Jack Daniels to reinforce our healing message and, the next day, set out for Botswana before dawn. It was going to be a long trip and we needed an early start.

When we arrived at the border, nobody was there to stamp our passports. But nobody was there to stop us, either. The country was standing wide open, so Mike and I did the obvious thing and motored through the dawn’s early light

 

 

the half-mile or so to the South African border post.

“So, where are your exit stamps?” the gentleman asked when we handed him our passports.

“There wasn’t anybody there.”

“They’ll do that,” he said, and stamped us into South Africa.