Maclear – A Farm Stop On The Way To Lesotho

It was really great to be on the move again.  Coffee Bay was amazing but I think 5 days is the maximum we should spend in a place.  It’s enough to get the feel of it, do the things we want to do, fit in enough work, get the kids to catch up on school and still chill.  Less than that and we don’t get to do enough of anything.  More than that and I actually start feeling restless and frantic about moving on.  (This is still the case even 3 months later, so you can imagine what being stuck in Piet Retief for 14 days is doing to me).

We chose to go to Maclear because we were finally starting to make our way to Lesotho.  And when we googled places to camp, we found Tortoni.  It looked so great that we actively wanted to spend time there and changed our itinerary to be there.  We made a great choice!!  The farm is so lovely and we basically had the place to ourselves.

There is something magical about arriving at a new place in golden hour.  Everything just looks incredible.  Full of light and promise.  Unfortunately I didn’t whip out my DSLR at the time because I assumed the weather would play ball for us and it would be like that every night.  Boy was I wrong.  It was soooo cold and cloudy.  But it’s OK.  It was good preparation for Lesotho.

The only stressful thing that we had in Maclear was that the internet didn’t work on our devices down at the camp site.  So we spent a lot of time in the coffee shop in the town to work.  But that’s OK, who doesn’t love a good coffee shop.

There’s always something about a place that will forever remind us of it.  And for Maclear it’s definitely the sound of cows mooing.  Shame, there was one little dude (who is actually a big dude) that was just taken from his mom and moved to a new pasture.  So they were calling to each other over and over again.  It was an experience.

What was cool was having a really lovely hot shower.  Seth made the fire at the donkey.  Which I had no idea was another word for an outdoor geyser where you light a fire and it heats it. At this stage we’d had some really horrible showers – I really hate gas showers.  They are so unreliable and just sudden;y go cold half way through!  It’s the freaking worst.

We’re still going hard with the vlogs even though they are quite delayed.  Much like these blog posts come to think of it.  But that’s just how it goes really, first priority is work and school then everything else falls into place afterwards.  Are you enjoying them?  Do you get a chance to watch them?

We spent a lot of our time here working and doing school, but that’s just normal really.  We also played a lot of games (Uno, Go Fish, Chess, Banana Grams and more) and spent time around the fire, riding bikes and chilling.  It was a great stay.