The full story of this trip appeared in Mountain Life. Click here for the published version or click here to read it on this site.
I look through the crisp moonlight to the other side of the canyon. I don’t see the three dark-cloaked figures anymore. I feel a sense of relief; I won’t have to deal with strangers in the night in this cold, remote, rugged place. Maybe they gave up on us, decided that whoever we were, we must be crazy for hiking up this canyon in the farthest corner of Lesotho after dark. I look down at my boots, then back up. The three are right in front of me. They’ve circled the canyon, impossibly fast, and they want to talk.
I always enjoy finding myself in those “how the hell did I wind up here?” situations. They force you to think through where you’ve been, and try to draw a line where the journey started. Ultimately, the line is arbitrary. You could say that we destined ourselves to wind up in that Lesotho canyon when we signed a contract to work for two years in a country we had barely heard of; you could say that we set ourselves on the path the first time we looked at a world map as kids, and found the idea of exploring it to our liking. But really, this trip started with a couple of guys standing around in the office kitchen, talking about the mountains and reading a single magnificently exciting sentence from a guidebook. The sentence didn’t stick, but the word did: Lesotho. We had to go.
So we bought tickets to Joburg, sourced cold weather gear in our country where it never snows, looked at some maps, called in a few favors from good friends, shoved a week’s worth of food into packs, and hit the trail. The views were stunning, the water refreshing, the skies clear, the scale of it all unimaginable; we learned how to negotiate encounters with Sotho herdsmen and their sheep, dogs, cows, donkeys. Basking in the glory of it all, we found ourselves heading down a long, winding river canyon on the fourth day of the trip. It slowly dawned on us that the river was looking less and less like the one on the map. Just in time, we figured out where we were, and that we had to head up the valley of a tributary to get back on track. The light was perfect as we started up the narrow, steep valley of the tributary, but the sun would be gone soon. We knew we needed to find a place to camp soon.
The problem was that this tributary was basically the Times Square of Northeastern Lesotho. There was less than a kilometer of river between neighboring homes, but we needed to find an out-of-sight place to camp. We made the call to hike through the brush up the narrow valley sliced by a stream, camping on the ridge up top. We set off just as darkness fell.
Halfway up the canyon, full darkness now, they showed up; three cloaked figures, waving to us, yelling something in Sotho. We kept hiking, but they came around the canyon to meet us, and there we were, face to face with teenage herdsmen in cloaks. They asked us to stay the night with them. We considered the situation: we’re in the most remote corner of a remote country, with one phone between the two us and no service to use it, dog-tired from a long day, cold, unable to see clearly more than a few feet in front of us, unable to speak the language, looking like guys who’d been out in the mountains for a lot more than four days. On top of our uncertainty about what would happen if we said no, it seemed like high time to spend the night in a hut. We couldn’t pass that one up.
So we’re following these guys across a mountain ridge in the middle of the night, stumbling across huge, slippery drop-offs, feeling our way over sheep trails we can’t see. We get to the hut- hundreds of sheep staring at us accusingly- and shove our bodies and packs into the four-foot door. The hut is maybe 6 feet high in the middle, 8 feet in diameter, with 2 thatched-stone benches, a clearing in the middle for a fire, a 50-kg sack of pap flour in the corner, and somehow a cellphone. We were guests in the truest sense. We felt hypnotized, immobile. We just took it as it came. Our night in the hut passed in a daze; there was no thinking, only feeling. I remember the thick smoke filling the non-ventilated dwelling, the low-voiced Sotho discussions, the mingling smells of smoke and sweat and dogs and stone, the scratch of the wool blanket, the bitter cold seeping through the doorway, the relief of the gray dawn. We got out of there alive, bleary-eyed, and hit the trail.
Sometimes you have an experience you realize will probably never happen again. You don’t know what it meant, but you’re glad it happened, and despite coming out with more questions than answers you come out a little wiser. Or at least a lot smellier.