to horses and donkeys, the ultimate 4 x 4:
to terraced mountainsides dotted with quaint villages:
to wandering rivers:
and to wandering animals:
But not before having one more adventure...Our van, which has always been in excellent condition, decided to rebel. We weren't fifteen minutes on the road when our car overheated. Luckily, there is a wealth of water in Lesotho, so we were able to solve that problem. It had rained the night before, so the roads were a bit muddy, which also slowed things down. But THEN...
We hit a big pothole. Our speedometer quit working. Then our fuel gauge stopped working. Then our transmission wouldn't change gears, since our speedometer wasn't working. Luckily, we could only travel slowly on mountain roads anyway, so we didn't hold up traffic, but it took a good five hours to get to Maseru before we could fix the van. Oh, I forgot to mention the two police roadblocks in between all of this!
In Maseru, Dad and Dan dropped us gals off at the tourism centre, where we watched the "Welcome to Lesotho" video enough times to memorise it, while they hunted down a mechanic's shop. They ended up fixing the vehicle themselves (turned out to be a wire that had come loose from the computer system), buying the tools and paying a mechanic R30 to use his vehicle lift.
Once we crossed the border, we encountered our first dust storm in the Free State. I grew up where there is dense fog, so this was similar in terms of visibility, but very different in terms of colour and wind! We drove through the dust storm for 150 km. It was immense, intense, and awe-inspiring!
After that we hit a good old South African thunderstorm, then Johannesburg traffic, and finally - 14 hours later - seven very weary travelers arrived home in Pretoria. (Did I just say "home"? More on that tomorrow...)
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