Mission: Finding the origin of the orange river

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

Losper

Race Dog
Joined
Jun 20, 2009
Messages
3,257
Reaction score
53
Location
Bloemfontein
Bike
Honda CRF-1000L Africa Twin
So,  Xpat calls me and asked me if I wanna join him on a trip to find the origin of the Orange river.
It took me exactly 2 seconds to think about it and the answer was: HELL YES!!!

The Orange river is called the Senqu river in Lesotho and it's origin is about 20km south east of Afriski at an altitude of 2940meters. Xpat has been exploring in that area on previous rides so the route plan was sort of pre planned.
We met up at Caledonspoort border post and trailored our bikes to Afriski. We left the vehicles there,got on the bikes and headed to Letseng mine where we took the gravel road and decended down to 2360meteres where we "booked" in at the Chalets in the Sky "guest house".

We were both on 500's, which is the perfect weapon for this kind of exploring ride. We got up at 5am and were on the bikes at 6am.
Find attached a map of the planned route up to the origin(red line) and then down again(green line) to the lodge.We were not sure that we would be successful to reach the origin (there was even a small chance that we would sleep in the mountains that night). The distance from the base at the lodge to the origin of the river is only 13km (as the crow flies) but we had to take a detour route that was 45km long (red line) because of the 600 metres we had to ascend to get to our destination. 
 

Attachments

  • 1a.jpg
    1a.jpg
    104.1 KB · Views: 577
Top