Rhino Peak Round Two

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JonW

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In September last year Highsider and I embarked on a ride with the mission being to reach the Rhino peak, which is a mountain on the southern border of Lesotho overlooking Underberg.

Unfortunately, due mainly to the fact that we ran out of time, our attempt at reaching the Rhino was unsuccessful. At the time we weren't too perplexed, because we figured that our failure gave us a reason to try the trip again, and I was confident that we would undertake the ride again in the next couple of weeks.

But as usually happens, life goes past at a hectic pace and over a year later we still hadn't done the trip.

Our Ride Report of the first attempt can be found here:

https://wilddog.net.za/forum/index.php?topic=229206.0

So a few weeks ago I floated the idea of doing this ride again and I got a very enthusiastic response from a number of people, including Highsider, Bullet, Dawie Roos, Beebob and husky, as well as the two youngsters of the trip, Christo and Gareth. Unfortunately Highsider had to pull out of the ride due to work commitments on the weekend of the ride, so it was just 7 of us that tackled the trip.

Reading one of Xpat's Lesotho Ride Reports prompted me to include a ride to Thabana Ntlenyana, Southern Africa's highest mountain. This we would tackle on the Sunday.

The plan was to stay over at the Sani Top backpackers for the weekend and use that as our base. unfortunately that didn't work out as there were renovations taking place at the backpackers and we weren't able to stay there, so we were upgraded to staying at the Lodge itself for no extra cost.

Dawie, Shaun (bullet) and Christo drove from Pretoria, Jon (husky) and Gareth drove from Durban and Rob (Beebob) and I drove from Pmb. We all parked at Shaun's mate's cottage in Himeville and rode our bikes from there up the pass. Rob and I set off together, as the others had got to Himeville before us and had left already.

On our car journey between Pmb and Himeville I had mentioned to Rob that I had seen a post by someone on Adv Riders SA FaceBook page that he had done the pass in 15 minutes.

While riding up the pass I had pretty much forgotten about the conversation, but obviously Rob hadn't. I don't usually ride as fast as Rob, but when we left the SA border he seemed in quite a hurry, so I just let him ride off and stuck to my pace. I had a quiet uneventful ride up the pass, didn't stop to take pictures or anything, but by the time I got to the top Rob was waiting for me, having already cleared customs. He casually mentioned to me that while he hadn't exactly raced up the pass, it had only taken him 12 minutes, but he thought he could do it a bit quicker if he really tried.

We met up with the others and checked into our rooms and before long we were in the famous Highest Pub and the Malutis were flowing freely. Unfortunately once we realized that we were being charged R45 per beer they didn't flow quite as fast  :(

From the pub we went outside to a spot where the lodge management had kindly provided a place for us to have a braai. We had each carried some charcoal up the pass in our backpacks, so we were able to make a decent fire, but weird at that altitude how little heat is given off by a fire due to lack of oxygen. Anyway before long we were happily eating our meat off the braai.

 

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