Day 344 / 109

Date: 22 March 2023
Sleeping location: Spare room in village chief’s house, Lelibohong (29.5825S,28.7541E), Lesotho

Distance (km today/total/total Part 2): 71 / 21317 / 6480
Estimated climb (m today/total/total Part 2): 1600 / 196500 / 78500
Road conditions: middling to awful 

Day in three words: Changing the plan

It was a beautiful calm, still, cool morning, in sharp contrast to the immediate steepness of the dirt road. That shouldn't really be a surprise as the next 90km involved over 2500m of climbing, all of it unpaved.

The first few hours was spent climbing, slowly and steadily, through consistently wonderful views up to the 3000m Menoaneng Pass, realising just how astonishingly beguiling Lesotho is. Countless steep rugged grass and stone peaks rise in every direction, and in the valleys there are stout little stone or cinder block houses with colourful window and door frames, yellow fields of wheat and masses of pink, yellow and white flowers. Higher up the crops disappear and sheep and cows roam free, or are herded. The people are all swaddled in thick woollen patterned blankets, grown men riding horses, youths sometimes on donkeys, women and children on foot. The people seem pretty standoffish but nice - adults make eye contact but don't say hello, then seem happy when I do. Children, as ever, are more outgoing and say hello all the time but usually because they want something. 

The last 2km of the pass was at 15%, rocky and loose and I mostly had to push, pausing frequently to catch my breath. The altitude is a real factor up this high, even for my mighty lungs. At the top I stopped for a break and calorie replenishment and three French guys holidaying in a 4x4 stopped to say hi. They seemed very impressed that I was still alive and upright. After the summit was a short section along a ridgeline with wonderful views down into deep valley, then a huge descent which was basically one giant bike handling course, rocky and loose with big washouts on the steep bits, bumpy on the shallow bits. I had to keep my speed down to 10-20kph and poor Maggie’s brakes took an absolute hammering; some bits I even had to get off and walk. It was of course beautiful though, big hairpins into a cute little village then along another river valley. 

The valley provided some fairly calm and pleasant riding before the river decided “sod this” and plunged into a huge gorge, meaning that the road had to climb steeply away from it for 200m. This was hard work but provided some incredible views of the gorge and the peaks behind it, then vast meadows of the pink flowers backed by mountains. This whole country is like a screensaver. I stopped for lunch, a big soda and some milk at a shop, having done 37km and taken 46 photos. I was pleasantly surprised by how much was on offer in the shop; Lesotho in general is not as poor as I'd imagined, most people living here are subsistence farmers but there are a lot of remittances from people working in SA. There must be a lot of families without a dad for much of the year.  

On the map the road looked like it followed the river, so I was expecting to be alongside it in the valley. Instead it was carved into the mountainside hundreds of metres above it, with steep slopes and sheer drops to my left. This place just doesn’t do mundane or easy. Along this road I hit the end of the school day and had to ride through hundreds of kids walking along the road, which was an absolute sensory overload. 90% of them asked for money or (mainly) "some sweets" or "The Sweet". One ran after me holding a peach and shouting "peach" repeatedly. It was fun to mess with them initially but soon got very annoying, especially when they ran alongside or behind me, which is an extra concern on a technical road. At one point I was surrounded by around 30 with their hands out in a begging motion, then running next to me, to the point that I had to stop and ask them not to because somebody was going to get hurt. 

After I escaped the kids I came round a corner to a view over a big descent then saw someone coming the other way with a light bikepacking setup. This was the first touring cyclist I'd seen since I left Charles and Anne-Claire in Malawi and I was excited, but he seemed not just uninterested but perhaps even actively annoyed to see me. We made awkward cycling small talk until his slightly more talkative friend “Tree” arrived shortly afterwards. I got weird and unfriendly vibes off them and a storm was coming in, so we didn't chat for long and I got back on the descent, briefly getting rained on but managing to outrun the worst of it. 

At the bottom of the descent was a beautiful smooth section along a river, which was very empty and would have been great wild camping but it was a couple of hours too early. Nothing stays easy here for long and soon I had a big climb up to a road running along the mountainside with wonderful views down to the river below. Moving slowly uphill, I went through another village with multiple kids demanding sweets. One kid was so annoyed by my refusal that he started saying "fuck you", and it's not often you get a free pass to swear at a child so I imagined him as a proxy for all the children that day and treated him to some swearing of my own. Hopefully he learned some new words from me. 

At the top of the climb was a junction. Straight ahead was the route I’d planned: 20km more dirt road, 150km of very hilly tarmac and and 200km of relatively easy tarmac through the more populated bits of Lesotho. To the left was a route that I'd dismissed as too difficult and remote: 175km of very hilly dirt road, 175km of very hilly tarmac road. But I had enjoyed today so much, despite the dirt roads and the climbing. The kids had been by far the worst thing about it. The alternative would have way more of the stuff I'd enjoyed and way less of the kids. On a whim I ripped up my entire route plan, replanned the alternative quickly to check its viabily, asked a couple of people if the road was ok - they said it was* - and went for it. 

It was almost sunset by this point so I filled my water and hit the new route, but there were no good wild camp spots so in the first village I asked the first person I saw if I could camp and was led to the chief's house. A massive thunderstorm hit almost immediately so we rushed inside a new looking house. Inside I was introduced to Jobo, the chief, his wife Patricia and kids Alice Moses and Grace.** This was their half finished home, but they had already moved some of their stuff inside it and they offered me a warm welcome and a bed in the spare room. I made some cheesy pasta (the wheel of Gouda was still going strong), listened to the rain hammer on the tin roof and reflected on how much I liked this place already.

*THEY LIED

**It took me a while to notice Grace, as she was a baby and was safely snuggled up on Patricia’s back in some kind of papoose