Mountaineering in Lesotho

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DirtyHarry

Race Dog
Joined
Dec 23, 2009
Messages
2,750
Reaction score
11
Location
Cape Town
Bike
BMW R80GS
Thinking of Lesotho, I had something like this in my mind.
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Unfortunately I only have the chance to get on my bike once a year to do a proper adventure trip. My social and everyday life restrictions are predominant. In reality we are all too busy.
This year I had a window of 12 days to sneak off. Since the annual GS airhead gathering was falling into the same period, I had the idea to travel through Lesotho and then attend to the gathering near Smithfield at the end of the trip.
Usually I do the more adventures bike excursion on my own. That way I am able to escape my normal life in the best possible way. Having no planning and no commitments works wonders at times.
For Lesotho I thought it would be a good idea to partner up with another rider. It’s easier said than done. Most of my friends don’t share the surprises along the way as much as I do. In fact I have never done a trip without any bike breakage and I was sure that this trip would also deliver some excitement.
Last year I have met Gery at the airhead gathering. He was the only one willing to follow me through a rapidly flowing river. The rest of our group preferred to keep their feet dry and used the detour on tar rather. When his bike decided to quit on him after the 3rd or 4th river crossing, he quietly took his bike apart without any sign of panic or grief. He was also the guy who could make his 60hp bike really fly on gravel. Not many people can average 120km/h over a longer period of time. He sure can.
When I have told him about my idea to travel through Lesotho without a fixed route or planning, he was also quite keen. After the 2nd beer he already agreed to join me.

Friday the 24th of April, Gery rocked up at my driveway at 7:50am and excused himself for being 10min early.  Due to some unforeseeable challenges I was running late with my bike preparation and my bike was not even packed. Usually I don’t have a plotted route on my GPS when I travel and rather take it by feel. Since I was travelling with company this time, I thought it would be a good idea to have a sort of planned route that we could discuss every morning. I did the route on Mapsource until late at night but I was not able to load it on my GPS for some stupid reason. Only later I found out the tracks on T4A were not continuous and my GPS was not accepting the route for that reason.
I skipped all less important things and packed my bike in record time. We set off only ½ later.
Day 1, ready to move:
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I don’t like to travel on tar and main routes if there are alternatives. Gery agreed and we set off through the backroads of Blouberg and Durbanville to get us out of Cape Town.
It was rather chilly in the morning and it only warmed up when we reached Robertson. After Montagu we finally hit the dirt roads towards Ladismith. After a total distance of 650km for the first day, mainly on gravel, we did arrive in Willowmore one hr before sunset and we were looking for a place to sleep. After fuelling up I did ask a few boeries along the way and one guy told us we could use his cottage for R400, located only 2km along a gravel road close to town. He was bombarding me with his best Afrikaans and I could only make sense of a fraction of what he said.  The key we could collect at the petrol station and the cottage we would find about 2km to the West out of town. He would now have to go for some beers and excused himself. The R 400 we could deposit under the hot water cettle in the morning and off he went.
To my surprise we found our place for the night straight away.  It was a perfect spot with a large area for the fire and a braai grid. A nice warm fire kept us awake for quite a while under the gazing starlight.
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This was already a good start to our trip.
 
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