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I spent my time in the Drakensberg at a really nice backpackers called Sani Lodge. They had free chocolate cake, so they’re pretty much my favorite place so far. The first couple nights I roomed with David (Austria) and Vreni (Germany), and they’re in South Africa volunteering with orphans and disabled kids. The three of us went on a guided hike together called “In the Footsteps of the Bushmen.” Our guide took us up a mountain, where we were able to see three different rock painting sites. It’s estimated that the paintings we saw were around 2,000 years old. Most of the paintings were done in red, but we saw a few white ones too. Typically pictured were people and eland (big antelope), and often the images showed a “trance dance.” This was a social function the Bushmen took part in, where the women sat around a fire clapping and singing while the men danced. The men would enter a trance state, where they would turn into animals and talk to spirits and bleed from the nose (lovely). All of which can be seen in the paintings, but not necessarily in my pictures.
There were a few other people on
the hike with us, one of which was writing a book about the Bushmen. He knew everything, and felt it was appropriate to interrupt our guide with his own little tidbits of information. The rest of us were getting annoyed with him; I can’t imagine how the guide was feeling. The fog was pretty thick the entire day, and at some points we couldn’t see more than a few meters ahead of us. It was also freezing! I never thought I’d wish for gloves while I was here.
I spent one of my nights hanging out with David and Vreni, as well as four other Germans. They taught me some new card games, including one called Kanook (sp?) that I was surprisingly good at. On my flight home I have something like a 15 hour layover in Frankfurt, so I assumed a group of Germans would be helpful in telling me what to do while I’m there. Nope. Not even the Germans know anything about Frankfurt. It’s not the most exciting city apparently.
I also took a guided 4x4 tour up through Sani Pass into Lesotho. Our drive up there was actually pretty terrifying. The fog was really
heavy, so we couldn’t see much - and as we traveled through stretches of road called Devil’s Elbow, Hemorrhoid Hill, and Suicide Bend, my confidence in our 70-year-old driver’s abilities wavered. But we managed to get up to the top and into Lesotho in one piece. I was pretty bummed with the fog, because the views would have been incredible. But not two minutes into Lesotho, the fog was gone and the sun was shining. We stopped to get out and take pictures of the snow-covered mountains, and a bunch of little kids came running up the road to us. Our guide told us that they were looking for sweets, and that on our way back we could stop and give them leftovers from our lunch.
We stopped at the top of Black Mountain for lunch, where we had some sweet views and were able to play in the snow. The areas we drove through were mainly used in the summer as grazing grounds for livestock. And nearby to our lunch spot we were able to see some “scare jackals” up close. Think scarecrows made out of rocks, and designed to keep jackals away from grazing animals. Our next
stop was in a little village where we got to see goat shearing. I know they weren’t actually getting hurt, but man those goats could cry/scream. It was hard to listen to. We also stopped into a woman’s house, where she baked us some bread, offered us Sotho beer, and answered any questions we had. Her little kids (and her chickens) filtered in and out of the house while we visited. Our last stop in Lesotho was at the Sani Top Chalet - home of the highest pub in Africa. Had some Maluti, the local beer, and sat by the fire awhile before heading back down to Sani Lodge.
My next roommate was a British kid named Ben. He’s been in South Africa teaching kids in a PE township how to play soccer. Freaking cool, I really want to look into doing that someday. Sani Lodge didn’t have TV, so on a couple nights we ventured to a hotel bar to watch some big Champions League “football” games. The hotel was a kilometer away down an empty, pitch black, and terrifying dirt road. I jumped a mile when a man passed us coming in the other direction. I have
no idea how he was walking that road without a flashlight. And one night just as we got to the hotel, we heard awful growling and animal screams. “Do not worry, the cats they are just playing” the man at the gate told us. Yeah right, something was definitely getting eaten.
Sani Lodge had a ton of hikes, and Ben and I decided to do one called Cobham. We were given two maps and a set of directions, which weren’t of the highest quality. David, Vreni, and the other Germans had all told me that they’d gotten lost when they tried to do one of the hikes; we weren’t any luckier. Not 20 feet into the hike I took a wrong turn, and quickly had the directions taken away from me. We got lost several more times, but managed to make some sense of the maps and figure out how to get to the campsite at the end of the trail, without actually following a trail. All that geography work with contour lines came in handy! Our biggest detour required unnecessarily climbing up a giant hill, and adding a couple kilometers to our 18km hike, but the view was
really nice and we got to see a couple antelope (reedbuck I think).
The way back to the lodge wasn’t much easier. The directions told us we had to cross this one stream three times. In no time at all we lost the trail again, and wound up crossing it at least seven times. We did see some more antelope near the stream though (eland maybe?). We eventually met back up with the trail, and this stretch was really well labeled so we managed to stick with it for quite awhile.
Rather than double back over the path we took in the beginning, we took a turn off downhill towards the road. After walking down that path for awhile, we came to a locked gate and were pretty sure we’d made another mistake. Rather than climb back up to the original trail, and since dark clouds were rolling in, we just climbed through the barbed wire and headed in what we figured was the right direction. We stumbled across a house with some people on the porch (who luckily didn’t mind us trudging through their yard) and they pointed us in the right direction back to Sani Lodge.
It had started raining at this point, but at least we were on the road and finally knew where we were going.
Overall, pretty successful for my first trip going solo.
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Katie
non-member comment
two words: hemorrhoid hill. awesome.