Note: This post is very long. It takes place over about two weeks, and I like details, ok? With this said, you may carry on.
PC service is divided up into 3 phases, phase 1 being the first 2-3 months of pre-service training in the training village, phase 2 being the first 3 months at site where you’re not supposed to leave your site except to go to your camptown to go shopping (the intention here being integration, because what else is there to do anyway?), and phase 3 being the 21ish months after that. As our 3 months at site came to an end, it was time for phase 3 training. I was so happy to be able to see everyone again, but at the same time I was not so happy anticipating all the sessions. Hopefully they would be more useful than those at pre-service training. Arriving back in the training villages was weird, and I was not excited about having to rely on my host family for all my food and even hot water. I didn’t like it at the beginning of phase 1 and I wasn’t about to start now.
Training progressed as expected. The most useful session was the first one where we explained our successes and failures after 3 months at site. My successes included getting along really well with my family, getting my garden going, and starting to become involved with the orphanage. The struggles included the ever-present communication barrier, the laziness of teachers and lax attitude of the school environment, and general boredom at school. It was good to throw around different ideas to see what experiments had and hadn’t worked at other’s sites. This session was followed with some other fairly useless sessions, as I had anticipated, but some of the language lessons were very helpful. In one of the sessions, we were introduced to PC committees, which I really want to become involved with to break up the monotony of teaching. Some committees include VAC (volunteer advisory committee), DSM (district security manager), DAR (district aids representative), GEL (gender equality Lesotho), and PSN (per support network).
I’d like to think that all was made well with a free pizza lunch at the hotel on the last day. In my book, almost anything can be made OK with free food, especially food with lots of cheese, a delicacy I can not easily find in my district. After the loveliness of the pizza, a bunch of us went food shopping in anticipation for our upcoming multi-day hike in the north during our week of vacation. This meant that I got a 1kg bag of peanuts and a dozen of the highest protein candy bars I could find (which means, not very much protein at all). In the process of doing this, as I tried to withdraw some cash from the ATM, the machine ate my bank card. It seems I had forgotten my pin, as I really don’t spend a lot of money and hence don’t need to use it very often to get cash. I went inside the bank and my eyes widened at the horrific line that stretched before me. Figuring I could get away with not standing in line, I asked an employee what to do. He ushered me to the “enquiries” window, which only had one person in line. Perfect. I gave them my passport (as you need to do with any bank interaction here) and after like half an hour of them dawdling around doing god knows what, I finally got my card back.
That afternoon, we 8 hikers plus Catie rode to her house which was on the main road in the direction we planned to go the next day. At one point, we were quite annoyed that the taxi driver made us get out and switch to another taxi, because we all had tons of stuff to move, but it turned out to be a good thing because we ended up on this awesome party taxi with van-shaking bass and blinking ceiling lights. With the little room we had, each person having a big backpack in their lap and squished against the people next to us, we bobbed our heads and jammed out for the next little stretch to Catie’s house. From her front step, you could see a bunch of bright lights in the near distance, this being the border to South Africa. It was obvious where the demarcation was between the rich country and the country stuck in the Stone Age.
After a night of sleeping all crammed into her house (some people just slept outside to have more room, but ended up soggy with dew in the morning), we headed off to the north, stopping along the way to drop excess stuff off at another volunteer’s house. As we were unloading, I managed to nearly pull off a stellar April Fool’s joke, for a moment convincing Lee that I had called the peanut butter brand that he is addicted to (Nutty P.) only to have them tell me that they have stopped producing peanut butter entirely, and that the last of their stock is what is left in stores right now. For about five seconds, the look of horror on his face was priceless.
The crew soon rolled up to Tsehlanyane national park, the starting point of what was planned to be an all-day hike to Kyle and Chelsea’s house in Motete village in the district of Butha Buthe. We paid M20 each to get in and headed straight to the swimming hole, where I just dunked in my head. Several hours of hiking with wet underwear just wasn’t on my to do list that day. After a few of us cleaned off a nearby tree of its ripe peaches, we headed out. Being the village rats that we had turned into, it didn’t seem right to pass up this free fruit opportunity. We walked for a few hours to this huge waterfall where I took a trip down the massive natural water slide. Hurricane Harbor, you’ve got competition. We continued hiking, stopping occasionally for a water fill-up. To sterilize the spring water, we either used iodine tablets or a tiny UV light stick. After climbing basically straight up the mountain for the last bit, at the top we decided it was going to be really stupid to try to keep going. It was getting dark and the other side of this mountain looked steep and treacherous. Due to frequent breaks and ending up moving much slower as a group than we had intended, it turns out we were only about halfway through what we had planned only one day for. The new plan was to camp out on top of this mountain and continue in the morning. It was probably the most ideal place we could have found to sleep. We prepped our sleeping spot: cut the tall grasses to make a soft bed, laid a tarp down on top of that, all crammed together on top of it, and put another tarp on top in case of dew or rain. It was really comfy and quite warm in there with all of our body heat, though it got kind of cramped. We lined up all our bags near our heads and made a short rock pile on the foot side in order to protect against wind. There were tall bluffs on either side of our grassy spot. Our spot was nice and sheltered, with tall bluffs on either side of our grassy patch. Kyle and Lee even scouted out a little cave maybe a minute walk from our sleeping spot in case of a downpour. We planned night watch shifts in case any herdboy, who Kyle had said might be aggressive at the sight of especially women, gave us any trouble, which they didn’t.
In the morning, we made a fire pit (aka a circle of rocks) where we burned our trash and some of our grass bedding (with a little methylated spirits (like purple rubbing alcohol) for extra fire power). Then we all ate handfuls of peanuts/raisins and chocolate for breakfast (mind you, this was all we ate for the entire hike) and started up the bluffs to the top of the ridge. Wow the parentheses are abundant. Anyway, Lee and Kyle took our coordinates with the GPS and planned out route with the paper maps printed from the Land Authority Office in Maseru. Apparently, the GPS hadn’t triangulated or something, and they determined that we were in a different place than we thought we were. They later realized that we ended up going down the wrong valley, going down one and having to cut over to the one we wanted. This added another few hours to our hike, to the chagrin of some people in our group, but to the indifference of others of us who just enjoyed the beautiful views of one of the most remote valleys in the country. We passed by many cattle posts, which are essentially crudely built stone and thatch shelters that herd boys stay in while they take their cows to the mountains to graze in the summer months. We were advised not to get too close to them because if there were dogs there but no herders, the dogs would just run after us until they caught us. Not an ideal situation. We spent the long day of walking playing “spot the herd boy” on the mountain side as they whistled to us, either saying hello or trying to herd us away from the dangerous posts. Sometimes they would come bounding down the side of the mountain to see what was up with this group of white people, and we obliged them by some courtesy greetings. If we engaged them, most asked for food, but we had to tell them that we didn’t have any extra food, as we were hiking a long way and needed what little we had for ourselves. At one point, we stopped to rest, and some herders and their dogs came and sat down with us. One of them had a puppy who adorably flopped down to rest against me, grateful for the giant patch of shade that my big backpack was providing.
The afternoon progressed slower than we had wanted, due to people needing frequent breaks, but we trucked on. We made it to this insanely remote village, no road or anything leading to it, no tin or foreign materials to be seen anywhere. After this village, we came to a big river where we rolled up our pants and waded across a big river crossing. We had asked herd boys along the way if it was crossable by foot, and they had said yes. We saw several people crossing on horses too. A horse would have been nice, though, because the water was toe-numbing freezing and came up almost to my waist in places. We had to keep chugging on through the darkening night because we were so close to Motete. To the light of headlamps and a bit of moonlight, we finally arrived at Kyle and Chelsea’s house. We were all so tired, some of us a little irritable about the extra length from the wrong valley, but relieved to be off our feet. My feet felt like they had just gone through a week of touristing around a new city combined with a day at 6 flags, plus they were disgustingly dirty (thanks, mesh shoes).
Let me just say that their house is the most enormous rondaval I have ever seen. It’s like a circus tent. And Kyle has ingeniously installed a gravity shower with a bucket that can be filled with hot water, raised with a rope to the tippy point of the ceiling, and lets water out through a hose at the bottom. Brilliant. A little leaky, but brilliant.
The next day, being sore and tired, we barely left the rondaval except to buy food (including 3 flats of eggs- that’s 90 eggs. And we ate them all.). We cooked and played Agricola for a good chunk of the day. For those of you who are not familiar with Agricola, it’s the most complicated board game I’ve ever played, where you have to build up a farm while figuring out how to feed your people. Going in turns around the table, you play and pick up different cards, and pick different action spaces where you can do things like build a fence, buy a sheep, harvest your field, bake bread, upgrade your house, etc. You have to plan like 4 moves ahead. It was a great game, not to mention a fantastic time suck for our lazy day.
The next day, our task was to wash clothes. Now, normally I abhor washing clothes. You have to wash everything by hand, obviously, it just takes forever, and I don’t think anything actually gets 100% clean (the way I wash, anyway. If I paid some ‘me in my village to wash my clothes, they would be sparkling, but they would also be in rags with all the scrubbing). The way Kyle and Chelsea wash their clothes is at the river, a short walk down the hill from their house. It was the most fun I’ve ever had washing clothes. I would definitely do it again. We had a really good system going, with one person scrubbing a piece of clothing in a bucket of suds, who would then toss it to the person standing at the rapids and rinse it out in the current, and that person would toss it to the person standing at the rocks who laid the clothes out to dry a little bit. We tried to keep the suds in the buckets and poured out the soapy water in the grass so that we would get as little soap as possible in the river.
Due to anger at the whole situation, feeling ill, and feeling obligated to stay with the person feeling ill, we lost three members of our posse the next morning. They took off on the taxi the next morning. The rest of us 5 decided to take another rest day at the village because it was supposed to rain or something. We spent the day attempting to catch fish, swimming/wading in the swimming hole, and making an awesome stew of potatoes, onions, carrots, chakalaka (spicy canned vegetables), and Russians (hot dogs). Nommm.
After three days at Kyle and Chelsea’s house, the next day we woke up at the butt crack of dawn to hike to Afriski. Afriski is a really nice ski resort, the only one in Lesotho. As you are probably an intelligent human, you can tell that Afriski is a combination of the words Africa and Ski, hence pronounced “Afra-ski.” One in our group didn’t quite make that connection at first and thought it was called “A-frisky.” The rest of us thought that was a much better pronunciation, so we all started calling it that. A frisky little ski resort. We walked along a dirt road for most of the morning, took off our shoes to wade across at least 5 river crossings, and reached a mine under construction. This area of the country has a lot of diamond mines, and you can see lots of places where people have done prospecting, with slabs of earth cut out of the mountain. It was after this mine that the road abruptly ended, and we continued on mountainside paths. We basically followed the river all the way up, following so many S-bends. It was cool, though, because every time we came across another bend, there would be a new view with a beautiful cascade or rugged cliffs with caves. TLC would not have approved of our hike, because we were certainly chasing many waterfalls. As soon as we caught sight of one of the Afriski buildings, we forgot our tiredness and just booked it up there. We sloshed through a soggy meadow on the final stretch and ogled at the view, just barely being able to see a mountain we had been on just a few days before.
The resort was really nice, full of Afrikaners and other white people. It was so weird. I stared at them like Basotho stare at me. Now I understood. We paid M115 each for a bed in the backpacker’s hostel. Each room was made out of a shipping container- pretty cool construction. We all took suuuuper long hot showers, reveling in the unlimited stream of steamy water, and then headed to dinner at the Afriski restaurant, the highest altitude restaurant in Africa. We woke up to frozen puddles and everything covered in frost. Elevation will do that. We said goodbye to Kyle and Chelsea as they headed back to their village down the path we had come up on. That left me, Lee, and John Lee. We were told it would be pretty easy to hitch back to the camptown from the road, as lots of people drove on this stretch of road. I ended up convincing this old Italian man to give us a ride (“Where are you headed?” I asked. “First, hello,” he replied. Oops. This happens to me way too often. You’d think I would have learned that most cultures value greetings. You’d think.). He was actually headed the other way, but he was like “OK, it’s a holiday.” And took us to the Butha Buthe camptown like an hour away. He had been living in Africa for many years and was working on the roads up here. He was pretty bitter about life, thought his kids were wimps, and preferred Putin to Obama. But it was a free and fast ride in a nice truck. Then from Butha Buthe we got a ride from a young mom with a baby in the back seat to Hlotse. We picked up that stuff we had dropped off (remember that? Yeah.) at the one volunteer’s house in town and then found a ride with a very interesting professor from the University of Lesotho. He was probably the most intelligent and reasonable Mosotho I’d ever encountered. John Lee got off to go to his site, so then it was just Lee and me, the usual partners in crime, riding with him to Maseru. We taxied to Mohale’s Hoek, then got shoved of that taxi and got put on a different one, which happened to have a bunch of PCVs on it, heading back from Durban for their vacation. What are the chances?
Phew! I finally made it back to my site the next day, exhausted and ready to go back to school. Congratulations. You’ve made it through the (long) story of training and Easter break hiking, easily the best hike I’ve ever done, hopefully one of many more in the mountain kingdom.
