Lesotho – in 5 photos

A journey across the Kingdom in the Sky

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Lesotho – in 5 photos

Dear NE-One

On the escarpment of the rugged Drakensberg mountains, and completely enveloped by South Africa, there is a country its people often refer to as The Kingdom in the Sky.  Lesotho, it’s labelled on maps – ancestral home of the Basotho people.

Lesotho is tiny. At its widest, the country measures only 240km and from top to bottom it’s just a few kilometres shorter than that. But the landscape… oh what a landscape! There is mountain after mountain after unforgiving mountain; delapidated roads – and some new ones – somehow manage to cling to the side of them, and there are villages so remote they can be accessed only on foot. It’s a beautiful but harsh place: relentlessly cold in winter and with an infrastructure that barely supports its resilient people. Lesotho is a country with big skies and a whole lot of soul… and here are five photos to take you there:

If you’ve seen one photo of Lesotho, it’s probably this: Maletsunyane Falls. At 192m, this is the highest single-drop waterfall on the continent – and if you’re brave enough, you can abseil 204m down the basalt cliffs beside it.

Thabana Ntlenyana is the highest point on the African continent, south of Kilimanjaro. Despite measuring 3482m above sea level it is a quite underwhelming to look at, surrounded closely as it is by other mountains – but the walk to its summit, and the view from the top, are exhilarating. It’s windy and wild up there, and on the hike Mark and I did earlier this year we met some of the shepherds who live the summer months up there, away from their communities but with the world at their feet.

Those clouds in the distance? Below them lies KwaZulu-Natal, one of South Africa’s nine provinces (and, one of the places I call home); the mountains on the horizon are the Drakensberg, which form the border between the two countries.

NE-One, meet Khotatso Ranoosi, co-founder of Paleng – Place of Stories. I met Khotatso the morning he took me on a walking tour of his village in the Malealea district, and then ended up spending an afternoon with him at Paleng, the small library he co-founded in an unused school room. That’s the library building, in the photo above, and that’s its collection of books, in the boxes behind Khotatso.

Khotatso is an exceptional man – someone as passionate about the power of books as he is about empowering the children of his village. Lesotho has an overwhelming number of orphans*, he’d told me, and many of the children who come to his library consider him a father figure. I’m hoping to catch up with Khotatso soon and share more here about his library and the work he does.

* According to this 2017 report by US Aid, there are more than 350,000 orphans in Lesotho (almost half a result of AIDS) and 45% of all households care for at least one orphan.

The very rare spiral aloe (Aloe polyphylla) grows in the Maluti Mountains that spike a ridge through the country and this aloe, which can be found in grasslands at altitudes between 2000 and 2500m, doesn’t occur naturally anywhere else. People will tell you that if the aloe has clockwise spirals it is male while counter-clockwise is female – but according to the botanist I met at Lesotho’s Katse Botanical Gardens, researchers say this is nonsense.

“Do you have any idea that you’re doing every horse-lover’s bucket-list holiday right now?!” my horse-loving friend Joni (an insanely talented artist, btw), messaged when I sent her the photo above. It was taken by Mark, because for two days, my hands were gripped so firmly onto stirrups and saddle that I have no photographic evidence of my own. The back of a horse is not my happy place. Ponies in Lesotho are, everyone will tell you, ‘sure-footed’… and they really are. The terrain they walk up is rugged and rocky and dangerous, yet they appear to walk it with ease. The landscape we rode through (when I finally plucked the courage to look around) was absolutely stunning and once up on the plateau we rode for hour upon hour across rolling grasslands.

As you read this Mark and I will be camping in the Drakensberg, on the South African side of those rugged peaks you see beyond Thabana Ntlenyana. The weather is starting to warm, and plans for a return to Lesotho are brewing.

With love

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