After
a fantastic taxi nap (the best way to pass the time on a hot/loud taxi) back
from Jeff’s house, I decided to waste some time in Mafeteng town by going to
the braai place for some lunch. There, I met a lady who used to work at the
clinic in my village as a nurse practitioner. She said that she was there for 4
years in the early 1990s, and found it funny that this was around the time I
was born. Not having been back there, she was quite surprised that there was a
secondary school now and that the area called Plenty was no longer active as an
agricultural organization planting produce, soy, and trees, and doing different
projects like fisheries, and that now it was an orphanage with around 100 kids
living there. She didn’t seem to remember her time there with much fondness,
noting its remoteness and bad road, but it was fun talking to her anyway.
The
next stop on my nomadic journey would be to my district-away-from-home of
Mohale’s Hoek. It was a nice couple of days spent making homemade samosas,
intending to work out in the hotel’s gym but not wanting to be stared at by
creeper bo-ntate in there, and hilariously paying for things at the bar with
only brown change (the equivalent of paying for something in only pennies and
nickels). Then I decided to go a bit out of town to stay with a friend who
doesn’t get out very often and who I hadn’t seen in a while. In preparation for
the tacos we had planned to make, I went to the butchery and bought what I
thought was normal mincemeat. It was super cheap, but I didn’t really pay any
mind. Turns out it was ground up random leftover parts or something, because
after we made our tacos and started eating, there was the occasional plink of a
hard fragment hitting the plate as we were spitting out the bone and cartilage
bits that were ground in there. Yum.
My
last stop in my Lesotho farewell tour would be to go to the way-out-there
district of Qacha’s Nek for a Halloween party at our friend Tyler’s house. I
found Colleen in town after sending some last-minute postcards from the post
office, and we got a 4+1 taxi to the edge of town to hitch south to Quthing. On
the way there, our hitch driver missed a stop sign at a police stop, but
realized his mistake, stopped, and backed up. Honestly, he probably should have
just kept driving, because the police were just chilling in the shade on the
side of the road and probably didn’t even notice. But, TIA, and he had to pay
the cop 50 rand to get out of it. Shortly thereafter, he dropped Colleen and me
off at the rank in Quthing just as the taxi to Qacha’s Nek filled up and
started to leave. Not wanting to wait forever for the next one to fill, we
walked to the road and unsuccessfully tried to hitch. About 20 minutes later,
the Qacha taxi conductor came up to us on the road and told us that the taxi
was almost full, and that we should probably get in. He added that he would
beat anyone who tried to pick us up. “How?” we asked. “They’ll just drive away…”
and that next time, we should at least walk up and over the hill so we’d be out
of sight of the taxi drivers. So, thanks, to pay weekend and people having
money to travel, we got into the almost-full taxi. 4 hours and R100 later, we
were finally in Qacha. The route was beautiful as we climbed higher through the
curvey roads of the mountains.
Stay
tuned for the mellow antics that ensue when you get a few Americans and a
German together for a holiday that isn’t celebrated in this country.
A billboard for Lesotho's 50 year anniversary of independence. The words below the 50 say something like, "Together we are a nation of cows." Basotho like to think of King Moshoeshoe the First (founder of the Basotho nation) as the OG cow, and themselves as the calves.
The only things holding this taxi together are threads and dreams
Kids playing on the slackline at the orphanage
Thank god for ice guava on a hot taxi ride
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