"Give me sweets!"

  Malealea, Lesotho
Tuesday, January 30, 2007

We arrived at the border of Lesotho just before dark which hasn't been one of our best ideas because cattle don't wear fluorescent safety vests and not every car in Africa has working headlights. Don't despair though, we arrived at our destination (Malealea Lodge)safely and were even pulled over by a local who happened to notice we were tourists and thought he would lend a helping hand by giving us more detailed directions to the Lodge. From that moment on we knew we would enjoy this country.

We booked a two day 'Pony Trek' and expected small little cute chubby animals but were presented with Pharlap and Sea Biscuit. Jamie claimed Pharlap and I was left with the cheeky one. For someone who had a slight fear of horse riding it was unusual to see Jamie whipping his horse after five minutes making it go into a full blown gallop. He also learnt that by hitting my horses backside with a stick, it would also start to gallop and unfortunately for me he found this very funny.


This wasn't just an easy little treck through the valleys... these horses take you down steep rocky hills, through water and then back up again. They occasionally stumbled but luckily managed to redeem themselves.

Every little village we past through the little kids would run out and yell "Give me sweets". We stopped in one village and let two little girls try on our riding hats, they started mimicking us on the horses pretending to say hello to the little villagers they encountered as Jamie and I demanded sweets.

The horses were a lot of fun, but not when mine decided to go for a swim...with me and the camera on it. I didn't realise that when the horse was kicking up the water with its front leg that it was intending to immerse its whole body in it, which it eventually did adding an additional roll which I didn't find that funny but it made great amusement for Jamie and our guide Josias. Luckily the camera was on the other side of the saddle bag. Because of my cheeky horse we put the camera into Jamie's saddlebag which he then left on the horse while we were having lunch. I guess the horse was a bit itchy as it decided it needed to get on its back and roll around...we were watching with our heads in our hands but then luckily the camera fell out and didn't get crushed.

That night we slept in a village and in a traditional hut. It had a slight smell to it because the floor and walls were covered in cow dung but this all added to the experience I guess.



The next day we galloped off into the sunrise ..... yeah right lets start again
The next day Jamie galloped most of the way home, with me behind him yelling obscenities (that I'm sure our guide had never heard before) to try and get him to slow down because once his horse galloped, so did mine and any amount of pulling on the reins would not stop the cheeky thing. After our arrival back to the lodge our guide took Jamie to the village shebeen (usually a tin shack serving alcohol) where he watched the village band get drunk off their donations that they made the night before at the lodge.


On our way out of the country a little boy grabbed onto our side mirror and demanded that we give him something. In a fit of rage I nearly ran him over. Then a lot of ladies were doing strange hand signals to us as we drove past, they looked like they were cursing us. We asked at the border what it meant and the guy made something vague up about it being some sort of symbol to vote for a political party. He must of told everyone in his office because as we left we heard a lot of hysterical laughter (which confirmed to us that we had been cursed). Just as we were about to leave we bought a local hat of a man with one arm who was a good guy and was just trying to make a living with one hand. I remember these words as he repeated it about 6 times. When our car wouldn't start after buying the hat we considered pushing it over the border because in Lesotho we had a 4000 Rand excess on the car but in South Africa there was no excess. One more try and the car started.