Far away...

A pot-bellied pig is plaintively asking me for food. Two immense chickens just mated at my feet. The sun is going down, and the cool, welcome wind is too intense to keep a candle lit. This is the most remote place I’ve ever been.

I’m sitting on the doorstep of the erstwhile tourist rondavel, in a clutch of similar huts 50 or 60 kilometres from Malealea, itself a world away from electricity, let alone the Web, so as usual I’m scribbling in my notebook. A circle of metre-high stone wall, about 8 metres across encloses the local cows for the night (though one just made a daring escape). The many chickens wandering about in the dust are starting to clamber up onto the head-high frame of sticks and twine that serves as their evening roost, lest the local dogs get any hungry ideas while the birds sleep. A few Basotho (local) women, spanning at least three generations, are brewing some variety of beer in a huge steaming pot over a semi-open fire.

The horse ride out here was a six- or seven-hour odyssey of amazing vistas and strained muscles that took me far, far away from the world I’m accustomed to. It’s very different here, and fascinating despite the emotion it evokes. Lesotho is poor, like no place I’ve ever seen before. I’m many, many kilometres away from the nearest power line, water main or paved road (or even a real dirt road, for that matter). Basotho are almost all subsistence farmers, and though there’s no famine here the country is dependent on food aid and economic opportunities are beyond scarce.

But at the moment, the scenery is intact and beautiful. The trek led us through innumerable villages and down, across, and up the deep gullies I saw yesterday. The landscapes are cast and varied – the plant life over our trek ranged from tenuous to almost lush (impressive given the dry climate) – all of it very different from what I’m used to. At the moment, the most obvious and striking are the aloe grey-green aloe plants. I’m told they’re like aloe back home, but these are huge - taller than my head and wider than my horse. Each of them is flowering, displaying orange blossoms on stalks that shoot as much as ten metres into the air for a few days before collapsing under their own weight.

The intensity of the ride was a new experience for me. My previous horse rides have been mostly of the 2-minute Washington State Fair variety, so hours of riding over really rough terrain was a bit of a change. Right from the beginning I decided to simply trust that my horse had no more desire to die than I, and I assumed that she would lead me wisely and surely down the steep, narrow trails of rural Lesotho. Unfortunately, my horse had, as Michael put it, “a bit of a suicidal bent”, manifested in her obsession with cliffsides. I named her Winnie (short for Winston) in honour of her sheer bloody-mindedness. No matter how broad and comfortable the path, no matter how stridently I tugged her towards the trail’s center, she was only happy tiptoeing right along the edge of dizzying plummets. Lesotho is an alpine country, with a palpable roof-of-the-world feeling. There are a lot of cliffsides for a deranged horse to flirt with.

But even my insane steed couldn’t dampen the fun. The six of us (two guides, myself, and the three friendly South Africans from yesterday, Michael, Lee and Donna) circled mountain after mountain, following village paths, dry clay streambeds and tiny, rocky paths. Our pace varied from deliberate to galloping (and butt-numbing), depending on the mood of the horses and the patience of our guide. We passed amused, candy-demanding children, and other villagers whose responses were by turns wary and quite friendly.

Our trek took us past dozen of tiny farms smaller than the average Canadian backyard, plowed by weathered human hands and occasionally oxen (never by machines). Corn and a handful of other dry-ground crops dominate the landscape, and the valleys reverberate with the constant ring of cowbells. Boys as young as three, wrapped in brightly patterned woven blankets and wearing conical Basotho straw hats, herd modest clusters of cattle and goats through the sparse grazing lands of the hills. Lesotho is one of the few developing countries where female literacy is much higher than male – apparently because boys are drafted into tending family herds in the absence of their fathers, many of whom work the mines in South Africa to supplement farm income. Tribal and family loyalties seem to dominate - one of our guides paused to hurl rocks and angry words at unwelcome herders urging their cattle across the wrong river to his tribe’s shore.

As far as I can tell, whatever indigenous ecosystem might once have existed here has long since been replaced by livestock. Paradoxically, people who have sought to lessen their poverty by expanding their herds are discovering that overgrazing and the attendant soil erosion threaten to completely destroy their livelihoods. It’s been estimated that by 2040 Lesotho will have no remaining land suitable for any kind of agriculture, precipitating a crisis for which the national government is, of course, completely unprepared. Anybody (I’m looking at some of you SFU folk) who pipes up about the romantic purity and simplicity of this sort of pre-industrial life can expect a thorough verbal beat-down – some of the human consequences of the subsistence lifestyle are too horrifying to comprehend.

But I do feel welcome here in this village. No doubt the revenue from renting out rondavel we lekowa (non-insulting local term for white folk) is a welcome boon, but there’s some genuine hospitality. A local woman asked with genuine interest (and excellent English) about what I was scribbling in this book, and was pleased to know that I was taking notes about the area. The locals laughed with us (rather than at us) for our clumsy attempts to visit with the village animals.

It’s growing very dark now, and in the absence of electricity the stars are growing remarkably bright. We’re setting out early tomorrow, so I’m calling it a night. I think this has been one of those days that will keep coming back to me for years, at unusual times and in unexpected ways. I’m glad I’m here.