I had hired a driver to come and pick me up at 9:30 to help me escape from the hotel. He suggested a trip to Morija and Thaba Bosiu. My ears perked up – those were just the two places I had been reading about and I was anxious to see for myself what they were like.
First we drove to Morija. It is the place where the first French missionaries settled around the 1820s. They became very close to the Basutho Chief. Casalis, the first of them, played a role of spiritual and later also political guidance counselor and stood by the Basutho Chief through a lot of turmoil during most of his career. There is a little museum in Morija with faded pictures of those days, the first chief and his descendants (up to now) and stuffed animals, artifacts and pieces of the meteor (and pictures of those who found them) that fell in this area some 9 years ago.
My driver suggested I go up the mountain and see the dinosaur foot. An 11 years old guide, Popi, offered to take me up for about 4 dollars. The driver stayed behind saying ‘been there, done that.’ Innocently and full of youthful arrogance I followed the young boy straight up the steep slope of the mountain for about 45 minutes exactly at the hottest part of the day. Older doesn’t always mean wiser!
Living in hotels had been easy on my joints and so I thought I was good to go. The boy was cool, walking slowly, drinking my water and asking me a thousand questions in his 4th grade English. After the questions about family came the questions about cars (yes, he knew what a Subaru was), about church (who did I go to see there) and places I had been. He spelled the Sesotho names of some magnificent birds we saw, apologizing for not knowing the English names.
The destination of the climb turned out to be a variant on Old Man in the Mountains – a rock formation that, with some imagination, could be a giant footprint of some pre-historical animal. When I asked him which animal he said yes to all my suggestions: lion, puma, tiger, elephant. He didn’t seem to understand dinosaur which was the reason I had climbed all the way up there. I felt a bit misled.
Walking down was another ordeal and severely tested my ankle and knee joints. By the time I came back to the tiny guesthouse from where tours are arranged I had the color of a boiled lobster.
While I was waiting for my driver and replenishing liquids I fell in with a small French/South African party. As it turned out they had grown up in Lesotho and one woman was the great-great-grandchild of one of these first missionaries.
I don’t think these missionaries could, in their wildest dreams, have imagined the success of bringing the gospel to Lesotho. All during the day we saw throngs of women and men, dressed in capes with colorful ribbons and sashes that, I presumed, showed which church they belonged to. They did fail to convert the first Chief, who died one day before his baptism. That must have been a big disappointment.
The second stop of my sightseeing tour was the mountain (Mountain of the Night). According to the biography I read it was given that name because the first Basuthos to arrive there under Moshoehoe’s leadership climbed the mountain at night, fleeing from marauding tribes. But my driver told me otherwise. “You see,” he said, “the old Bashutos seem to think that mountains grew overnight.” I imagined something much older than these first Basuthos, when the earth was boiling and volcanoes popped up everywhere like basty pimples. The landscape does look a little pimply.
Moshoeshoe (Moshoesh for short) spent most of his adult life on this flat mountain top, keeping maurauders and attackers down. All the while some of his own people did the marauding in the flats where the Boers were whenever they ran out of meat and grains (and later weapons). It was an endless and lethal game of tit-for-tat.
As we walked up the steep path to the top of the mountain, more insult and injury to the already worn joints, snippets of vague memories started to come into my conscious. When we turned a corner I realized I had done this trip before, 21 years ago. It was as if a light in a dark corner of my brain suddenly was turned on, like the clothes closet in my hotel room – when you open the door the light goes on. Of course I had been here and explored the mountain top, with Michael, when I was young and supple and probably raced up and down without any effort.
Lesotho must be the only place in the world where you have to walk up a mountain to see the grave of the nation’s founder – an unassuming pile of rocks that stand in sharp contrast to the marbled mausoleum of the current king’s father who died in 1995. All that stuff was brought in my helicopter no doubt.
At the base of the mountain a giant re-creation of the mountain top ‘kraals’ is nearly finished but not open yet. For now the few tourists are cramped in a few open rondavels with braai pits. The Seventh Day Adventists were on an outing, travelling in buses with HIV/AIDS messages all over them (we pray for, no against, HIV/AIDS). Although praying is not an approved public health measure, in this country with its staggering numbers of infected people, anything is welcome.
There is not that much to see at the top, except for the giant agave plants that used to delineate kraals, and a few roughhewn structures – the chief’s house among others – built by and Irish builder who has escaped from the war on the flatlands. On the request of the chief, dictated by one of the missionaries, he excused for his AWOL by the Brits and so he continued building. If there had been water lapping at the edges of the plateau, you could have imagined being in Ireland.
The final descent was a killer – my painful joints and feet complained as I carefully positioned my feet on the millions of small and larger rocks that had been thrown throughout the 1800s from the top to keep the attackers down. It made for a very bumpy road up at the time and now it makes for a very bumpy road both ways, but especially down.
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