Stormy times

Being 10 time zones, 24 hours of air travel, and worlds separated from Seattle provides, it turns out, little buffer against the outrageousness, the vulgarity, the historic awfulness of he-will-remain-unnamed.  Social media and digital access to newspapers provide a continuous feed of news.  Good and bad.  Hooray to Judge Robart, to the ACLU, to at least a few of our politicians, for standing up for the Constitution, the law, real American values.  Still, foreboding sits heavy like the clouds of the Drakenburg mountains, where we reside at the moment.

Today is Monday, and on Saturday we flew from Jo'burg to Durban, rented a car, and drove about 4 hours away from the Indian Ocean into the green green foothills.  On the way, we hit a ferocious storm, staccattos of lightning, sheets of rain, even hail.  At one point, visibility became so bad, fast-cycling windshield wipers notwithstanding, we had to stop.  Fortunately, we were following a truck loaded with construction equipment and could follow its tail lights, so when it stopped, we did too. 

We eventually made it to the backpackers lodge on the way up to Sani Pass, the much-visited border between South Africa and the Kingdom of Lesotho.  Yesterday, a local bird guide picked us up at 6am for an all day trip up the pass and beyond, and though the rain of the night before never really let up, we saw many interesting birds - subject of another post - and the beautiful geology of the Drakenburgs ... black and rust sandstones lower down, basalt cliffs higher up.

Lesotho is a relatively new country of a relatively new culture.  According to Stuart, our guide who grew up in the area, worked in Zululand as an ecological reserve warden before starting to guide tours privately, the people of Lesotho are an amalgam of tribes driven from their homelands as far away as east Africa, but mostly from Botswana (which explains the crocodile on the kingdom's official shield, even though no crocodile could live in its environment), by tribal wars in the early 1800s.  They were unified in around 1820, and formed into a kingdom that was subsequently a protectorate (against the Boers) of Great Britain.

The land is stark, narrow valleys dotted with sheep and goats (brought by the Europeans) and stone shepherd houses with stone corrals.  The border is at 2600 meters, and we transcended a second pass further on that topped 3200 meters, roughly 10,000 feet.  Not much grows up there, and what game had existed, for example antelope of various types, had long been hunted to extinction.  So, Lesotho and its people are very poor, relying on selling wool and mohair from their herds, smuggling marijuana into South Africa, and tourism.