Crossing into Lesotho at the Makhaleng Bridge Border Crossing
Oh hello there. It’s been a while hasn’t it. If you haven’t been following along with us on our social media (mainly Facebook or Instagram) pages then you probably think that we are still stuck in Lady Grey which would have been an alarming amount of time to be stuck in a place as that last post was 4 months ago!
The situation is that life on the road is not what I pictured. Somehow I thought we’d have a lot more free time to do the things that I want to do, like take and edit photos, write really great blog posts, read, explore, hike. OK maybe not the last one, but you know what I mean. The reality is that it’s a hell of a lot of driving, squeezing in work in wherever possible and shouting at the kids to do their school work instead of sprawling out on the table like slugs.
The blog has taken a bit of a backseat to be honest . It’s just the thing that matters the least right now. Which is crazy because there was a time in my life that it was everything to me. So in a weird roundabout way I have enjoyed this time off to reevaluate what matters and more importantly, how I want to keep going on here, but that’s a story for another day.
For now, let’s travel back to the end of August when we crossed our first ever border into the Kingdom of Lesotho!
Lesotho landscapes
The border crossing was ridiculously easy. We had to pay a small fee, but they didn’t ask for any papers aside from the ID books and unabridged birth certificates for the kids. The kids were so stoked that they got to stamp their passports but couldn’t give less of a crap that they were in a whole new country.
Immediately our data stopped working. Which makes sense, you know, crossing into a new country and all that. However, we hadn’t prepared a place to go and so had no idea where to drive to or what to do. In hindsight we could have stopped at any one of the million bright red shacks to buy a sim card but I struggle with that. I don’t know why. I expect the worst to happen, like the sim will destroy my phone or something. Stupid, but there you have it (after now having visited Mozambique and Swaziland, I’m much better with this).
So we used the limited Google maps that still worked and headed to the closest big town which was Mohale’s Hoek.
Such a beautiful Spring scene – not even a hint of the snow we were hoping for
There were a few things that struck me about Lesotho. Everyone had a house. A proper brick house and their shops were in shacks, which is pretty much the opposite from a lot of South Africa. The weather was a balmy hot temperature and not even close to hoping for the snow that we’d come there for. And everyone was completely and totally smitten with Optimus. Every single person we passed on the way there waved at us and stared at this funny looking van.
We got to Mohales Hoek and found a hotel. It was one of the only places we could find that had something open for us. It included breakfast and our room had two 3/4 beds. A bit of a tight squeeze, but we live in a van, so it’s not exactly a tragedy. In fact it felt luxurious having a bathroom right there! No walking through bushes in the dark – score!
Free shower caps are what hotel fun is made of
Seth got a SIM card and the hotel had WIFI (that only really worked when it felt like it) so we were back in action.
We used our time here to acclimatise and plan a bit of a route around the area. We headed out to a nearby town to see some Dino footprints which is huge there. In fact they have found so many of these identical footprints around the country that they have their very own dinosaur named after the area, the Lesothosaurus. Like legit. I’m not making that up.
Check out that prehistoric sign
Check those footprints
Say Lesothosaurus!
After not having any connection to like, anything in Lady Grey, we spent quite a bit of time catching up with school work and work work. We also enjoyed being able to have a nice long hot shower and go to the loo whenever we needed to without rallying the entire family to go. (So as to not have to do it again then the next 20 minutes).
I would go anywhere with this guy
Optimus also had a sweet spot outside our room
So excited that she got to use the computer
1 comment
[…] usual, we stumbled upon this gem by accident. While we were in Mohale’s Hoek we actually started researching Lesotho a bit. We do that now, just figure out the next stop from […]