Beach bums part 1

9^th October-11^th October – Days 375-378 – Tofo, Mozambique

Tofo (spelt in that way but pronounce Tofu, like the fake meat) is probably Mozambique's most touristy town, but it's surprisingly and pleasantly low key. As in Zanzibar, I arrived with a feeling that I may not enjoy it all that much but Tofo grew on me quite quickly. Its hot, dusty and sandy streets were great to walk around, local people would smile and wave. They'd definitely get tough on bargaining if you launched yourself into the process but there was no HEY MZUNGU!-style chasing as there are in some towns and somehow Tofo seemed to have character, which I find tourist towns are totally devoid of. We wandered up a long, sandy path through more huts and palm trees (getting deja vu yet?) to Bamboozi, an entirely natural backpackers which blended beautifully into the natural surroundings. A bar and restaurant overlooking the sea was another nice touch. It was a bit far out from the centre but Tofo is a small town and a 15 minute walk wasn't completely out of our capacities.

Tofo beach

...and Tofo town

We settled into a Mozambican lifestyle. Walking, beach, beer, piri-piri calamari. Unlike Mozambicans, though, we didn't respect the piri-piri enough and often ended up rushing for ice to stick onto our pained tongues. The days were languid, lazy and enjoyable although this had a real "end of the trip" feel to it. We would be back in Europe in a few weeks and our drive to push forever forward was quickly disappearing. I was happy sitting around watching people and time go past, thinking back over the year gone by, wishing another one was ahead of us. We'd have both jumped at the chance but our bank account was suffering dangerously by this point and we had stretched the trip probably as far as it could go. In the same way that a terminally ill person will spend his or her remaining days in as comfortable a setting as possible, so our trip's life was coming to an end and Tofo was our hospice.

Don't lose hope girls, there is still time to do things!

The path to Bamboozi

Still, there was a bit of life in us yet and we'd lined up a little visit to the close-by town of Inhambane and a trip around the surrounding islands on a dhow, a typical Arab-East African boat. It wasn't grand adventure but they were perfectly reasonable hospice activities.

Hospice activities #1

Sea, sand and sun

7^th October-9^th October – Days 371-373 – Závora, Mozambique

Our taxi eventually turned up and whisked us off in the direction of the Junta bus station. This being our first time in Maputo we had no idea what the Junta bus station looked like, although at some point we ended up on a roundabout next to a wasteland with loads of buses on and I predicted that this may be it. The taxi driver, however, had other ideas and shot off in another direction, talked on the phone for quite a while and then indicated that he was chasing our bus. When we eventually met up with it and got thrown onto it along with our bags, it trundled back to the Junta, sat there and waited. Eventually it moved northwards and the ticket man asked us for 3 times more than the bus was supposed to cost. This was the tourist bus to the beach town of Tofo, we were told. Hurrah ! After protracted arguments, we managed to get a price which was cheaper than was listed on the back of the ticket, but also more than we would have paid on a normal bus. Such is life.

Tired of Africa already

Our destination was Závora beach, a small cottage run by a South Africa we had met in Pretoria a short time ago. Scott was running a volunteer project in the area and had a few spare beds which he would rent to us for a decent price. There was no electricity and no town, just a hut on the beach. We'd already given up on our preferred idea of going to northern Mozambique - it seemed far more interesting than the beach-and-more-beach south but it was just too far away for the time we had left. We'd have to settle with what we had time for and so beach-hopping would be it. Inna was tired from work anyway and she didn't seem too put out by the prospect. It was the B option for all of us but we didn't mind all that much.

We met Scott in the small town of Inharrime on the main road, went to buy some food for the next few days and hopped into the back of a pick-up to squeals of delight from Inna, and bounced down a sandy road through small villages and palm trees towards the beach cottage. Here we would proceed to play games, read books, sit in the sun, wander on the beach, and chat with two volunteer girls who were working there for a while. Of course, we're still young and so the girls took us up the beach to a hotel one night where we had beer and playing pool, but in short, we enjoyed the nature, the sun, the company. And err.. that's it.

Splashin' around

Group photo (there wasn't much else to do, was there??)

But of course it wasn't all relaxing! After a year, T finally gets a picture taken to prove that he, too, did some work on this trip. It took Inna's arrival for this to happen. Thanks!

Not the most unpleasant bus stop in the world. The pick-up back to Inharrime is on its way..

After a few days of this, we upped sticks through Inharrime and Inhambane to Tofo, another beach town. I was spending my time fervently denying that I was abandoning my Somaliland-and-Burundi style travel preferences to become a beach-bum - let me clarify and state that I don't mind beaches from time to time but a) not for too long and b) not utterly surrounded by other tourists and tourist-hunters trying to rip you off. I was concerned that Tofo might be exactly that, and I was about to find out...

Back to Africa!

4^th October-7^th October – Days 369-371 – Maputo, Mozambique

Arrival in Maputo was an experience that we hadn't been through in a while – it had been weeks since we'd arrived in a new big city, and Maputo was in a new country. We had no idea where we were, we didn't speak any of the local languages (as, after months in English-speaking countries, we were suddenly plunged into Portuguese-speaking Mozambique) and, having played the parts of head clowns in the visa circus of that afternoon, we arrived in Maputo quite a while after dark. Fortunately, the minibus driver was a Swazi who had taken pity on us being put through the visa treadmill and gave us a lift to Base Backpackers, the crashpad we had lined up. As we offered him a small tip for his troubles, he almost fell over himself in gratitude (a nice surprise as I was worried that he wouldn't consider it enough – although we were almost cleaned out of cash by that point) and we disappeared into our room. A nice Indian dinner over the road eventually followed (after a painstakingly long decision-making process finally solved when I just walked in) and we crashed for the night.

Our first full day in Maputo was just spent wandering around. I wouldn't exactly say that it's a beautiful city but it's certainly charming and I liked it pretty quickly – it's full of life (at least during the day) and has a strange mixture of architectures too – narrow Portuguese-colonial streets and main roads of large concrete buildings which looked like they took their inspiration more from the earlier independence days when Mozambique liked to think of itself as Marxist. With Soviet economic and military assistance probably came Soviet architects and the results are plain for all to see. There's something about the mixture of these large concrete buildings and the African adaptation of them – similar buildings we saw in Russia were still grey and looked miserable but in Maputo they were colourful – clothes and textiles flapping from the balconies to dry, colourful shops and cafes on the bottom floors and of course the noise and activity that you'd find in a city the size of Maputo. And, just as the city still has its buildings from those days, it has also kept the street names – our wanderings took us down streets and avenues named Vladimir Lenine, Ho Chi Min, Patrice Lumumba, Karl Marx, Mao Tse Tung, Robert Mugabe, Ahmed Sekou Toure and so on. Great African or world visionaries who didn't cozy up to communism and its ideals were strangely absent...

The "Marginal"

Old meets new - Maputo fort which stands in the middle of a 70s apartment-block jungle

The day (if not much energy) was spent wandering lazily, dropping into cafes for a bite here and a Coke there, sitting on the wall along the seafront and eventually finding a small bar for a 2M, Mozambique's best (in our opinion) beer, and a chat with the owner, a Portuguese guy who came here a few decades ago, never left, and is now the proud owner of a Maputo bar and a Mozambican passport.

Travelling with two girls, I suppose that it's inevitable........

Our second day came with a mission thanks to Jay, a guy who'd lived in Mozambique for a while who we'd met in Johannesburg. He'd told us about a fish market where you could buy a fish or 2 and take it to a restaurant out the back where it would be cooked and served up for you any way you wanted. We hopped merrily into a minibus heading north along the coast (or rather crawled into it – we're back in Africa now where the concept of a vehicle being « full » is rather a hazy one) and, with bodies twisted into shapes they had probably never been twisted into, rattled our way up to the district known as Costa do Sol, where M assured us that we had to change minibuses and go further. Would Lonely Planet be reliable this time? Would M's faith in it ever be shaken? When the minibus emptied out enough for us to breathe (and we even got a seat eventually) I asked the guy for the Mercado do Peixe. He smiled uneasily and pointed back to where we'd come. Ah well. We walked down the beach for a few kilometres, stopped for refreshments under the trees, and carried on our way. A woman passing by obviously saw the looks of slight confusion and asked us where we were going and told us that it was quite far back into town. An African perception of « quite far » is difficult to judge. Sometimes it means exactly that, and sometimes it means that it's about 300 metres. Whether this is a reflection of the speaker's reluctance to walk or the speaker's assumption that whites are lazy and use their cars to go everywhere (which, having seen how the majority of whites in Africa are, is quite understandable) is not obvious to me. When we asked for precisions, though, she told us that it was about 4 or 5 kilometres and so she ushered us into another minibus, telling us where to get off.

Some of the fish, which began a long trip from the ocean, via the Mercado do Peixe...

The lucky ones ended up in our plate.

Here, we satisfied one of Inna's wishes for the trip by buying a coconut and a straw for 10 meticais, and walked off towards the famous fish market, easily identified by the overpowering smell of fish and large amounts of people selling fish. We settled of 3 kilos of red snapper and kingfish, which was expertly fried up and served with rice, salad and coconut. Not bad. As we left, we spied the « Restaurante Caipirinha » where we savoured one of the bar's eponymous drinks, and the heavens opened in quite a spectacular way. This meant that we ran to the neighbouring pizza restaurant for more sitting around.

Inna discovers how tough life has been for us over the past year

We got dropped off in town a reasonable walk from where we were staying and wandered through the darkness back there, stopping at a small shop for a bottle of water where we were served by an old Portuguese guy. « How are you? » he asked. « Fine, fine, just enjoying a night time walk... » Inna replied. We were then treated to a small warning of how it was dangerous to walk around in Maputo at night, as I tried to think how many times we'd been given this warning about various towns. Maybe we just look tough or maybe we've just been extremely lucky (or maybe these warnings are overly precautious) but we've walked at night in many larger towns and never felt a threatening situation or come across any sort of trouble. On this evening, we were just asked for money by a guy who claimed that he'd just come out of jail and needed bus money to get up to his home in Xai-xai, but when we told him that we had nothing, he just disappeared off into the night. We did the same, facing an early morning in the Junta bus station.

Maputo, 4.30am. We're back in Africa, and that means painful wake-up times

Pointless detour

1^st October-4^th October – Days 366-369 – Johannesburg, South Africa and Mbabane, Swaziland

Inna had been talking about coming to Africa for a few months (or even a few years) and various problems meant that she'd nearly have missed us. In the end, we managed to stretch the trip with a bit of inventive budgeting (i.e. creating a state of denial about how little money we had left) and Inna, a friend of M's from Helsinki, would provide company for the last two weeks of the trip. She'd been to South Africa before with her parents and remembered a guided tour of Johannesburg by car, with tinted windows, and strict instructions to not unlock the doors at any point. This would be a slightly different view of the city...

New recruit !

We picked her up from Jo'burg International Airport and asked the info desk how to get a taxi back into town. After a small explanation of our meaning of the word “taxi” (a minibus taxi, rather than a white paranoia private taxi) and an inquisitive look from the info desk guy who probably hadn't heard this kind of request too often, he pointed us to the far end of the airport where we could get a ride to Kempton Park and another one to MTN station downtown. “So this is big bad Johannesburg !” she exclaimed with a hint of possibly surprise. We wandered through town again, bags on backs, to Park Station, Jo'burg's main transport hub. It's a large, confusing place and with the help several helpful standers-around, we wandered through the station, past the KFC, up the staircase and into the chaotic minibus taxi park where we eventually located the minibuses to Swaziland. The Mozambican visa question had caused us a bit of confusion – the price had recently gone up to 80€ although a phone call to the Mozambican embassy in Mbabane confirmed that they were selling it for 85 rand, a mere tenth of the price. We had hence decided to make a little detour through Swaziland in order to pick it up.

Park Station, minibus section. Despite the smallness of the fine, I went for a different option

“You'll see the difference as soon as we cross into Mozambique”, we told Inna. “It'll be the real Africa. South Africa is nice, but everything works. You never get flat tyres, things run on time...”. This, of course, is why we ended up sat on the hard shoulder halfway between Johannesburg and Nelspruit with the driver desperately trying to flag down passing minibuses to replace his flat tyre. A flat tyre for which he didn't have a spare, obviously. Great!! A few other minibuses pulled over for a chat, one of which unloaded a gang of friendly drunken Swazis returning home from a wedding. One of the guys asked if he could have M as a wife but then confided “I already have a wife. She is already too much for me. Anyone who takes a second wife must be crazy!”. The gang piled in again having turned up the radio and given us a rousing demonstration of Swazi dancing and we eventually got going, thanks to a breakdown truck which had brought us a new tyre.

"You won't find this back home" series #3528043

It had been a while...

Mbabane greeted us again under a shroud of darkness and after a bite to eat and a beer at the Phoenix (a regular haunt for us the last time we were here), we headed off to Bombaso's and were greeted like old friends. The previous bunch of Finns had departed and we spent the evening in the company of a new bunch of Finns which gave Inna a soft landing, M a chance to speak Finnish in a group, and me to take stock of how terrible my Finnish had become... Our stopover in Swaziland turned out to be useless, however – it was a public holiday in Mozambique and the embassy was closed and after a bit of headscratching, we hopped into a minibus to Manzini, where we'd connect to a Maputo minibus, trying our luck on the border for a visa.

Good morning Mbabane!

The trip started off well, aside from an Ethiopian-style argument with the ticket man:

- You must pay for the bags.

- No. The Mozambicans are not paying for their bags, so we will not either.

- Yes, you must. (repeat ad nauseam)

Eventually, he got bored of this discussion, shrugged his shoulders and wandered off. However, when he took our money for the tickets along with that of the other passengers, he kept the money that he'd wanted to charge us for the bags and I started to enquire about where the rest of our change was. One woman in the minibus seemed to speak English, translated for the other passengers what our predicament was and under an increasingly loud torrent of abuse in Portuguese, the ticket man returned our change and we hit the road. At the border, however, we turned from heroes to zeroes as the other passengers sailed through the immigration formalities and we got our visas done. It turned out that, unlike the one we got between Malawi and Zimbabwe many months ago, this post gave super hi-tech visas featuring digital photos, digital fingerprints and so on. Unfortunately, it appeared that the border guards were not too familiar with technology and as time ticked on, our visas didn't seem to materialise. One border guard would hold the passport saying one of our names, the other would repeat it with a questioning tone, and there would be a deadlock. It took quite a few repetitions before the passport-holding border guard would decide to spell it for the typist-border-guard who seemed to have been introduced to a keyboard for the first time only that morning. A picture was taken, more details were taken, and the driver would come in telling us that he was leaving in 10 minutes. This happened for all three of us and, after two hours, we emerged in the dark to a riot in the minibus as the other passengers seemed rather unhappy about being made to wait for so long...

EU taxpayers, be reassured - your tax money is not being wasted in Mbabane...

Township Tourists

29^th September-1^st October – Days 364-366 – Soweto, South Africa

On a trip like this, it's inevitable that we're going to have a few surprises. They'll be negative, they'll be positive, and no matter how much you move around on a continent like this, your expectations will always be confounded one way or the other. That said, I don't think that anywhere has the gap between expectations and reality been so sharply contrasting. When you hear the word Soweto, you associate it with the worst excesses of the Apartheid system, with shanty towns, piles of garbage and so on. The picture, in short, is pretty bleak.

This is Soweto. Orlando West and the Orlando Stadium, home to one of South Africa's biggest football teams, the Orlando Pirates

I wasn't really expecting anything in particular from Soweto but I suppose that, if I was expecting anything at all, I was expecting something along the lines of what I just described. This seemed to be coming to bear as we trundled out of Bree St minibus station having gone through the usual walk between MTN and there, wondering where the hell the minibuses leave from and not being able to get any reliable information at all from anyone. The Southwestern suburbs of Jo'burg aren't particularly inspiring – tired-industrial looking with generous amounts of rubbish strewn all over the place, broken and boarded up windows and tired-looking people. The buildings soon gave way to « informal settlements » as they're called here, small shanty towns of small, home-made shacks. Then, we turned off the road onto the Soweto Highway and towards the self-proclaimed world's most famous township. And this is where things started to get interesting.

I'd read that Soweto actually has the highest concentration of millionaires in all of South Africa but, with my impressions of the place without having seen it, I'd always half-presumed that these millionaires were gangsters or criminals or whatever. As the minibus rolled in, though, we were greeted with sights that we certainly didn't expect. Tidy gardens, well kept parks with kids playing in them, and the small Sowetan houses mostly had garages with cars in them. A young guy from the minibus volunteered to escort us to Lebo's Soweto Backpackers – apparently the only backpackers in Soweto – and we set up the tent and tried to take it all in. I suppose that there are rougher parts of Soweto too, but this is true of any town of any size, and Soweto's population estimates range from 1.5 million to 4 million. Orlando West (the area we stayed in), though, looked as nice as any part of Johannesburg. The houses were smaller than in Sandton or wherever, but it was definitely a place that locals kept up and were proud of. We celebrated our arrival by teaming up with a few Frenchies who were staying there – a lone guy and a family with two young kids – and went to the shebeen down the road for a few beers and to watch Man Utd. Against Valencia, which was a mind-numbingly boring game. In contrast, the bar's owner seemed so delighted to see us that he gave us each a free bottle opener and kept up a lively chat through the evening.

He walked into an Orlando Pirates bar with a Kaizer Chiefs shirt on but got no trouble. If that ain't love...

WARNING : COMMERCIAL PLUG – If anyone ever considers going to Soweto (and they should), Lebo's is one of those places that you look at with wide eyes and just have to take your hat off to the guy who started it all up. According to the story, Lebo started his community work by cleaning up the park over the road from his hostel, which used to by a rubbish dump. He got the community involved, set up some swings and slides and football goals, and the park now swarms with local kids every day. He says that, as a former crafts salesman, he got sick of seeing tourists come into Soweto by bus, take their pictures, and then go back to Johannesburg. And so he started renting out beds in his parents spare room before opening his own place in the house his grandfather used to own. He's one of those guys who's never had any formal training in the tourism industry, but has succeeded in what he's done through determination and dedication, not only to the local community but also to showcase Soweto to the world. It worked well with us and, by the look of the guestbook, we weren't alone in feeling this. It's definitely a place we'd go back to. END OF PLUG.

In the garden at Lebo's

Vilakazi street - civil rights struggles have been won, other struggles are just beginning (with the help of Ryan Giggs)

Orlando West is home to Vilakazi Street, which is (or should be) known the world over for several reasons. During the apartheid era, this relatively small street was home to both Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, and Sowetans will tell you that it's the only street in the world that has been home to two different Nobel Peace Prize winners (and I haven't done enough research to either confirm or reject this assertion, but it's certainly possible). It's also the home of several high schools which were central to the organising of the Soweto Uprising in 1976. Hector Peterson, the 13-year-old boy who was killed during the uprising and whose picture spread shockwaves around the world, was shot in an adjoining street. Vilakazi Street has changed a lot since those days – Mandela's old house is now the Nelson Mandela Museum, over the road is the Nelson Mandela Family Restaurant and there's also a swanky restaurant close-by populated with well-to-do locals and tourists. The past is not forgotten, though, and signs take you through the history of the area, mostly the Soweto Uprising. The streets are freshly paved and occasionally see a busload of tourists coming in to see various museums. When we bought the Sowetan « Kota Burger », we walked to the Hector Peterson memorial and ate it over the road from a sign advertising the opening of Soweto's KFC. It seems that times have changed – and as one of the Vilakazi Street signs told us, what we were doing would not have even been possible 20 years ago – journalists were banned and non-Sowetans had to apply for a special permit to enter (which probably wouldn't be granted in any case). We left the Vilakazi Street area with a happy feeling – the township has come on leaps and bounds since the end of apartheid (aside from its imminent hosting of a KFC, which is arguably a big step backwards) and we were happy to see it now before it becomes just another part of Jo'burg. The history of the place will always remain but it's still one of the few places in South Africa where a tourist can walk the streets and get cheery waves from women doing laundry or have a bunch of kids walking alongside trying out their English.

M ponders her choice of Kota Burger

Beats KFC any day!!

It seemed suitable that it was in Soweto, one of the centrepieces of modern African history, that we spent the one year anniversary of this trip. Unfortunately, it seems that I got lost somewhere along the way and so it only appears as « Day 364 » in the title of this post. As the people of Soweto know well, things don't always go perfectly...

Downtown Orlando West

On the day we were planning to go back to Jo'burg, we had a little side trip to the Apartheid Museum, a collection of stories and exhibits from the shady days. While the things presented are generally what is already widely known, the way that it's all presented illustrates just how ridiculous the whole thing is. Entrances to stations, train station platforms, public toilets, park benches and so on – everything was segregated. Pictures from the street showed public toilets with four separate doors – white women, white men, non-white women, non-white men. The differences in spending on health an education for whites and non-whites were laid out as were quotes from leading politicians at the time explaining that the sole purpose of the South African black should be as a provider of manual work to advance the white cause, and so on. Reading these quotes just made you wander how the rest of the world tolerated such a system for nearly 50 years and indeed supported it, against the greater threat of communism. In return, South Africa set out some of the toughest anti-communist legislation in the world, although in practise this was used to suppress any criticism of the system. Nelson Mandela, for example, was thrown into jail under the Suppression of Communism Act. The pass system (which allowed blacks into white areas just for enough time to work, after which they had to return to their homelands) was also set out for us. In the end we didn't have enough time to see the whole museum, but it left us with another lasting impression of just how far the country has come in the 16 years since Mandela became president. South Africans, both black and white, call this the era of freedom. I've heard white South Africans describing the Apartheid era as the dark days, the days of the fascist dictatorship, and so on. Sure, South Africa still has a long way to go on the road to racial harmony and just from being on the street, it feels like there is a lot of tension between the races. An afternoon at the apartheid museum to see just how bad things used to be changes your views on this though. The grace with which most black South Africans have moved on from those days is amazing too and seeing how these people were treated for 50 years makes you smile and how Sowetans will see white faces walking through their streets and greet them with a wave and a smile. Some people we've talked to say that it's depressing (one otherwise tough white South African we met in Jo'burg claimed that he couldn't ever go to the museum without crying) and some say that seeing the past shows how inspiring the future is. I think we both came out this way, and I certainly returned to Johannesburg seeing the country through slightly different eyes after these few days.

Return to Snoozeville

25^th September-28^th September – Days 360-363 Pretoria, South Africa

We'd struggled to find anything to do the first time round in Pretoria and it looked like it would be similar this time round. Unfortunately, Christine's house was full but fortunately, this meant we'd be staying in a backpackers (even if, unfortunately, we'd have to pay for it). Fortunately, I had my legion of infections (the face had since been joined by 2 comrades, one on each leg) as an excuse to not do anything. M jumped on the bandwagon quite happily and we sat around, watched TV, chatted with the various characters around the place. Two Dutch student nurses who worked up in Botswana were nice company, and two women wandering around with Bibles (one of them was an American missionary, the other was South African) had such an innate fear of speaking, it appeared, that I became mystified at the spectacular advances made by Christianity in this part of the world. I can only assume that other missionaries were perhaps more forthcoming with their communicational skills. The American was from Kansas City though, so maybe that's some kind of an excuse.

No caption required

We were about half an hour's walk away from Christine's, yet the scenery was very similar. Roads went between large houses as far as the eye could see, the jacarandas were awaiting our departure before they'd start to bloom, and so on. One thing that I noticed last time and forget to write down was something which I can imagine was done just to make Pretoria slightly more interesting for passing motorists or residents. It seems like the city's land has been re-zoned (this according to signs which have been propped up here and there) and so land that used to be one of these long straight roads has now been packaged into something that can be sold off. That means that Soporific Avenue, for example, is now divided into two parts as there's now a large garden in the middle of it. This has two potential consequences – firstly, a drive who wants to get from one end of Soporific Avenue to the other has to take a detour via Snooze Street and Sweetdreams Drive. The other, far more hilarious yet unlikely consequence, is that someone driving down Snooze Street will take a left into Soporific Avenue as he did last time he was here, but then will rather unexpectedly collide with a brick wall a few metres down the road. I didn't manage to see this happen, though, so we called Christine and went ten-pin bowling with her and her guests for the week, which was nearly as fun.

Just before we fell asleep for all eternity but having done such things as laundry and disinfecting infections, we roused ourselves and got moving southwards. The final goal was Soweto although we'd stop at a backpackers for the night closer to the airport to drop off some bags.

T bravely attempts cooking in a Jo'burg blackout

A Ride with a Giant

22^nd September-25^rd September – Days 357-360 – Pietermaritzburg and Northern Drakensberg National Park, South Africa

The aim for a few days was the Amphitheatre Backpackers, somewhere in the middle of nowhere. After the cold of Lesotho didn't induce the more climatically frail of us to go wandering around the Sani Pass, the Drakensburg mountains looked like a better bet. Various pieces of advice let us conclude that we needed to take a minibus taxi to Ladysmith, change there get to Bergville, and then get another towards Harrismith, which would drop us at the Backpackers' turnoff about halfway down the road. Simple, right ? Once again, we managed to make a mountain out of a transportational molehill. Pietermaritzburg to Ladysmith went perfectly well, as did Ladysmith to Bergville. However, it seemed that the final minibus had left towards Harrismith and we were advised to "go to the main road and hike". Hiking is a rather vague concept in South Africa and means getting a lift with whatever passes - it could refer to hitchhiking just as much as it could refer to trying to get into a passing minibus which has any space. The act is the same though (stand by the road and try to flag down passing vehicles) and so we walked out of town towards the main road and tried our luck.

Our luck wasn't really in for a while and M eventually decided that the best course of action was to go to the nearest petrol station and pick up an icecream and some drinks and see if anyone could give us a lift from there. No such luck, but a few minutes later a large pickup containing an even larger man ground to a halt and asked us where we were going. "Sure, I'm heading that way, get in" he said, and we did. Our new friend was a friendly and talkative guy, eager to hear our opinions on South Africa as most people in this country are. He was from Bethlehem, further up the road, he told us, but worked in Durban. "Did you go to Durban ?" he asked. "We did !" M piped up from the back. "We saw a rugby game there a few weeks ago". This seemed to interest our new friend. "Sharks against Western Province eh ? I played in that game". This is when I started regretting not reading up about rugby very much and I had to admit to him that I knew very little about the game, although we promised that we'd cheer for him next time we saw him on the TV. "Haha ! OK, I'm number three for the Sharks". Noted. "And number 3 for the Springboks as well". Aha ! So we were getting a lift from an international rugby player. Great. I asked him name, warning him in advance that I'd probably never heard of him with my limited knowledge of rugby. So our new friend was called Bismarck du Plessis, and he seemed not to mind that he was helping out a pair of rugby ignoramuses. He dropped us off at the Amphitheatre, politely declined our offer of a beer to thank him for his help as he had some business to take care of back home, and took his leave. We instantly called all of our South African rugby-watching friends to brag about what had just happened, and wondered what the chances would be of David Beckham or Zinedine Zidane giving a pair of hitchers a lift in Europe. Probably rather slim.

George the tent gets another workout

The stay at the Amphitheatre itself was a bit of an anticlimax - the guided tours were too expensive for us and another lump was sprouting on my face, meaning that I wasn't feeling energetic enough to go and wander around. M did so for a short time but it seemed that the distant mountains were a lot further than they appeared, and she returned without having left flat ground. These few days, then, were used to relax again. It was a nice little place with a big grassy area for sticking up the tent, a cozy bar and a restaurant that did decent food. We read books, sat around and picked up our energy for the final leg of the trip. Less than a month was left before the flight home and we wanted to make the most of it.

M explores "The Berg"

and this is what she finds.

Another hour of attempted hitching finally got us back to Bergville from where we grabbed another minibus up towards Pretoria in a desperate attempt to find something interesting to do there. We had some things to pick up from Christine's place and aimed to be in big bad Johannesburg within a few days.

Bergville, anyone? I'm not fat, I've just got an abcess...

19^th September-22^nd September – Days 354-357 – Semonkong, Lesotho to Pietermaritzburg, South Africa

Semonkong had treated us well, but there was only a certain amount of times that you could walk past Pep to a Chinese supermarket and then back to the lodge before it starts getting repetitive. Hunter and Jana were going back to work in Jo'burg and offered us a lift to Maseru. In wonderful South African style, we set up camp in the back of the bakkie with all of their camping equipment, including two thick mattresses that they'd put at the back as some makeshift sofa. They left the hatch up so we took pictures, let our feet dangle over the edge and took advantage of various other simple pleasures that would be totally illegal in Europe until the dust got too thick and we closed up. It was the same road as we took down so I won't describe it all over again (even if it would be in the opposite direction) and the trip passed uneventfully save for the obligatory flat tyre not far from Maseru. As luck would have it, the car ground to a halt just outside a garage and a guy came, took off the wheel, fixed the puncture and replaced the tyre, all in approximately 6 seconds. Chris had given us vague directions to a place called “Darnlink Hostel” he had stayed at in Maseru and, after some quite intensive driving around in circles, we were dropped off outside the old airport as Hunter and Jana wanted to get back to Jo'burg before the sun went down too far. We exchanged numbers, promised to meet up when we got back to Gauteng, and walked off smiling again at just how selfless South Africans are when it comes to helping people like us out.

A couple of kilometres' walk later, we found the place wasn't called Darnlink at all, but Durham Link. We got in anyway, set up the tent, and wandered around Maseru for the evening. It's another one of those “nice enough to walk around but with nothing in particular to do” places. It's the capital of Lesotho so by Sotho standards it's a huge place with every amenity one could possibly hope for, although if you lifted the whole city up and plonked it across the border into the Free State, it wouldn't really be very remarkable at all. We ate some enormous sandwiches and decided to head off to Leribe the next day.

Ol' George gets another workout

Leribe isn't very far but it was a bit of a hassle to get to and took about 5 hours to cover the short distance between the two. There isn't a direct minibus between the two towns, it seems, so we sat on a minibus to Maputsoe for a small eternity waiting for it to fill up. There, we were subjected to the usual coming and going of sellers of various things – some were familiar from other countries (grilled sausages, fruit, cheap sunglasses, mini-mirrors, little plastic things like hairclips that seemed destined to break as soon as you used them, etc) although one curiosity that seems exclusive to Lesotho is the guy who walks up and announces “I am selling stickers”, all of which appear to be of God and Jesus and the Virgin Mary and various other biblical characters. Neither of us really thought they would look good on the backpacks (even if divine protection may have been a useful side effect of purchasing such stickers) so we didn't get any. M decided that money would be far better spent of getting a Cheese Twister from the nearby KFC and I volunteered to go and satisfy her stomach. As soon as I'd ordered, of course, the driver came in and declared that we were ready to go. There were no twisters and only a small selection of various burgers so I took further time to get some food and eventually we got going to Maputsoe. People piled out along the route, though, and at Teyateyaneng we were pretty much the only passengers left, so the driver shunted us onto another minibus, which we again waited in for a while before we got going. The change in Maputsoe was smooth and we got to Leribe quickly. A fellow passenger with the delightful name of Phineas pointed us towards a cheap guest house and took our number, and we parted ways.

After another trudge to go and find the “Naleli Guest House”, we had one of those experiences where you realise that Phineas' interpretation of the word “cheap” probably is diametrically opposed to your own. We tried anyway and got offered a room at a mere 75€. Panic. We politely enquired as to whether there were any slightly cheaper places to stay but it seemed that the only other place that the receptionist knew in town was the local hotel. A quick phone call revealed that the prices were pretty similar. With that curious look of disbelief that Africans seem to give white kids who declare that they don't really have that much money to spend, we were offered the room without breakfast for 20€ less. With heavy hearts and very much lighter wallets, we accepted it. Phineas called to ask if the price was satisfactory. I dodged the question slightly. One of the advantages of getting a room for this price, of course, is that you have such things as satellite TV in your room. It appeared, though, that in the Naleli Guest House, each room had to watch the same programme despite the fact that every room had its own remote control. This led to us having a comical channel-surfing battle with someone from some other room – it seemed that our wish to watch the al-Jazeera news and documentaries didn't agree with their desire to watch home-makeover programmes and the SpongeBob SquarePants movie. We turned in early anyway as we had plans to escape this money trap and get off to Mokhotlong in the far east of Lesotho.

"Cheap Guest House"

Leribe High Street, early morning

Mokhotlong has all the feeling of a frontier town and, much like Semonkong, has the charming feature of two parking areas for each restaurant and bar (one for cars, one for horses). It's a dusty town which probably wouldn't rank too highly on a museum-and-architecture fan's list of places to go, but it was like many of the mountain villages we'd been through – an experience just to be there, and the feeling that you'd stepped back several centuries in time (if you can ignore the few pick-ups rumbling through the streets). We followed a sign for a B&B, headed off down the indicated road and the trail promptly dried up. Another one we found was full, and the women running it took us to a totally unmarked house where we were offered a room for 25€. The Ritz it certainly wasn't, but it was fine. We sneaked off for a dinner of microwave reheated rice and “Russians” (a type of sausage which probably doesn't contain much meat but has so much colourant that if there's a power cut, it's the only thing in the room you can still see). We hit the sack early again, knowing that we'd have to drag ourselves up the hill to the minibus station as the minibus to Sani Top would leave at 6am, pronto.

Mokhotlong sunrise...

Travelling in Lesotho - a must for those looking for the "tough guy battered by nature" look

This, of course, is why we were still sat around at the minibus station at 10am, waiting for more passengers. I do love the relaxed African concept of time, but I also despise getting up at 5.30am for nothing. Especially when it's freezing cold and my lips are falling apart from the cool, dry Lesotho air. I balanced it out and decided I'd still rather be here than getting up at 8am to go to the office in Europe (no matter how warm it would be there). My mother cheered me up immensely at this point by thoughtfully sending a text message to inform us that we should psychologically prepare ourselves because autumn was fast arriving in Europe. Great. Things felt much better.

Mokhotlong minibus station

The climb up to Sani Top, when it eventually got started, was slow but spectacular. The Sani Pass itself, the only road between Lesotho and all of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, was originally a mule track which was widened to take cars but it's still the kind of road where you feel like tapping the driver on the shoulder and asking him when his minibus was last serviced. This was on the way up, which we discovered was the gentler part. As we got to the Lesotho border post, we saw the Sani Top Chalet to our left, where we had been planning to go, stay for a couple of nights and have a mountaintop hike or two. As we got out, though, the wind was strong and cold and M didn't fancy putting the clothes she had with her to the test against the meteorological conditions up here at nearly 3000m. We looked both ways before heading off to the border post to get stamped out – we'd be continuing towards South Africa after all. With all the cool and calm for which I am renowned, I sulked a bit about missing Sani Top before realising I was being a bit of an arse, and sorted myself out. The cracked lips and an emerging lump on my face weren't really helping my mood though, and we rolled on to Underberg along the steepest slope I think I've even been driven down courtesy of a ridiculously tight series of hairpin turns.

South Africa seen from the Sani Pass

A bunch of tourists seen from the Sani Pass

A quick change of minibus in Underberg took us to Pietermaritzburg, where we'd be spending the night before heading out to the Drakensberg National Park for less windswept hiking and the chance to spend more than one night in the same place, which we hadn't done for quite a while by this point! Hurrah. “Maritzburg” was another one of those towns which I'd have liked to walk around more but neither of us really had much energy for it. Instead, we took the easier way out of having a beer and reading “Getaway” magazine, of which there were large piles at the friendly Umphiti backpacker's that we'd ended up in. “I'm sorry”, the owner said, “but I don't get much demand for camping these days. You can put your tent up there, though, while I try to chase the chickens back into their cages”. That raised a smile, but M and I decided that spirits could only truly rise by being taken around the corner for a Scooter's pizza. As always, it did the trick wonderfully well.

T celebrates his return to South Africa with another fabulous lump

The Walk in the Sky

15^th September-19^th September – Days 350-354 – Semonkong, Lesotho

Semonkong isn't really a one horse town in a literal sense – I don't think any town in Lesotho is. It's a town where the local shebeen has no car park but a place to park your horses. There's a big horse station on the main “square” (which is surrounded by two dusty Chinese-run supermarkets, various patches of grass and a South African “Pep” store which looks bizarrely out of place). Metaphorically though, it is the perfect example of a one horse town. The road from Maseru ends abruptly here, ensuring that anyone who comes this far faces a bumpy off-road bus ride all the way back to the capital, and there are just a few houses dotted around. Tarmac is, of course, a distant dream and local people mill around wrapped in their Basotho blankets and all toting rubber boots. It's a strange yet beautiful, enchanting place. Semonkong lodge, which seemed to be the only place in town to stay, is slightly out of town and set on a hillside, at one with nature as these places should be. There are small cottages dotted around and not a sound for miles around. The fact that our cottage was right at the top of the hill was not helped by the thinning air at this altitude and we were always out of breath when we got to the top but it was well worth it for the views across the valley.

M navigates the perilous slope to the cottage in the sky

Downtown Semonkong

Even more downtown Semonkong!

We'd signed up for a wander out of town towards the Maletsunyane Falls, which go nearly 200m into a gorge. In the spirit of Southern Africa it's been exploited by a company offering the longest commercial abseiling drop in the world but it's pretty discreet. We wander through fields, our guide chatting on passers-by on horses. I smile as I tell him that, back home, horses are for the rich. “Ah, but in Lesotho” he tells me, “Cars are for the rich. You have your cars, we have our horses”. As we get to the Maletsunyane gorge, he takes us to a small path which weaves its way almost vertically all the way to the bottom. It's a strenuous descent during which both of us took spectacular tumbles – so strenuous in fact that it wasn't until we got to the bottom that I realised we'd have to climb all the way back up. Hell. We had a bite to eat and a snack (and the guide disappeared for the third time, which I'm sure has nothing to do with the fact that we'd agreed to pay him by the hour) and met up with two horse riders living in South Africa who we'd seen at the lodge, Hunter and Jana. We had a chat, agreed to meet them at the shebeen later on, and hit the slopes up again. It's hard really to encapsulate the beauty and wilderness of the area in words so I'll let the pictures do the talking...

Basotho horses on the way to the falls...

The Maletsunyane Gorge

Maletsunyane Falls from the top of the gorge

Our guide tries to work out how to squeeze an extra hour from the walk

Following the river back to Semonkong

There's not much to do in Semonkong – wandering around town and having chats in the shebeen were about it, but it's a great place to take a breather. Unfortunately though, we were out of cash and the phone lines into town weren't good enough to take Visa Electron cards and so we had to cut the stay short. Hunter and Jana, in good South African style, offered to pile us into the back of their pickup for the long ride back to Maseru. We exchanged numbers, agreed to meet up in Johannesburg and waved them off, once again reflecting on how friendly people are around here.

Hunter, M, Jana, Chris in the happenin' Semonkong shebeen