Sani Pass and Lesotho

    These photographs were taken in 2003 when my father and I went to South Africa.   This portion of the trip was during the middle part of our journey.    Lesotho is completely surrounded by South Africa and is nick-named the mountain kingdom because it resides completely within a mountain range (the lowest point in the country is over 5000 feet high).  The first photo is a hotel situated at the foot of the mountains that separate South Africa and Lesotho.  You can see it is a very nice place, but it is very typical of what you used to find all over South Africa, now that South Africa is becoming more and more like any other country and places like this only exist in the more remote areas of South Africa.

The mountain range in the back is very typical for this part of South Africa and you will see more examples in the next few pictures.

    These photos are of the road to Sani Pass.  You have to go high up into the mountains to reach the border post between South Africa and Lesotho (at least from the east, from the west it is very easy to go in and out of Lesotho).  Here you can see more clearly what the mountains look like.  These are the Drakensberg Mountains and they all have this untouched beauty to them.  On the Western side my Grandmother grew up on a farm that  went right up to the Drakensbergs and Lesotho.  In the second photo you can see the car we were driving along the road.  I was the one driving and it was very fun.  In many locations the road was little wider then the car.  This is definitely an experience you can't have in America.

Finally we get to the South African border post.  If you look past the border sign you will see the road.  That is the no-man's land between South Africa and Lesotho.  Technically, the previous road was actually the road to Sani Pass, this is the actually Sani Pass.   It is about 50 miles to the Lesotho border post and only a 4-wheel drive vehicle can actually pass through it (and as you can see we don't have a 4-wheel drive vehicle).  Somewhere beyond that sign and before Lesotho is a bar that calls itself the remotest bar in Africa. 

    So, since we couldn't go through at Sani Pass, we drive all the way around Lesotho and enter from the western side of the country.  This is the saner way to get into Lesotho since it only requires you to drive on a highway.

Going in to Lesotho is like stepping into a time warp.  The principal mode of transportation is donkey and the BP stations there sell paraffin, not gasoline.  I could only find a couple of pictures of Lesotho and none of them show the people.  What a shame.  The first shows some typical homes that the Lesotho live in, it is very simple.  It is nearly impossible to find a picture of flat land in Lesotho since it is completely covered by mountains.  The second photo shows part of a lake that was created by damming a river.  This dam was built by South Africa and provides all of the electricity for Lesotho and most of the electricity for the central region of South Africa (the most populous). In addition there are huge underground tunnels that carry water from this lake a 1000 miles north to the central region and provides all its water needs.  To give you an idea how high up this is, when we started the journey in South Africa the temperature was about 38 C, by the time we reached the dam a few hours later the temperature had dropped to 18 C!  That is a difference of 20 degrees.

Anyway, that is all for now.  I will show you more photos later.