Had a free day to pursue local activities around our ecotourism resort in Lesotho. It is a very cool place where the locals all contribute and benefit from the success of the enterprise. I signed up for a bit of mountain biking and a walking tour of the village nearby. Some of my fellow travellers opted for a bit of horseback riding on the same trails we mountain bikes on.
Feeling a bit overly confident, I signed up to do a 25km ride – even though I was nursing a bit of a cold I picked up a few days ago. It was intended that we finish the ride within 3 hours, but our guide decided to cut it at about 15kms because we weren’t peddling fast enough. I was keeping up okay, but some of my fellow travellers kept falling behind forcing us to wait. Honest, it wasn’t me! I was kind of relived to cut it at 15kms, anyway, because of my cold and the very hilly terrain.
It was a beautiful ride around the rim of a canyon that ran through the valley where our resort was located. It started out as nice single track with low scrub and ended up on dirt roads. About 4/5’s of the way through it I ended up with a flat tire. Our guide forgot to bring a spare tube so he loaned me his bike and rode the cycle I was using back to the resort – stopping every so often to refill the deflating tire. His bike was MUCH nicer than the one I was originally riding and much more like my bike back home, so the last stretch was a lot easier for me!
After lunch we took a walking tour around the village to see how things were done in traditional Lesotho culture. The people are extremely poor, but most are very friendly. We visited a small fruit and vegetable shop, a beer making enterprise (where we taste-tested their local brew), a craft shop where crafts were made by locals with AIDS to raise money for medical care and testing, and finally to a museum of their historic culture. Our guide grew up in the village and knew all 600 names of the locals that lived there – because you are expected to know and greet everyone you meet if you live there. She was dressed very nicely from used clothes donated by tourists who have stayed at the resort.
For dinner we were invited to one of the local homes for a traditional Lesotho meal. The cook was just a local villager who had been recommended by the ecotourism resort and money was paid by our tour group to give support to local communities. He came to the resort to escort us and our guides through the pitch black village (which has no electricity) to his home to feed us. We sat in a room which served as a bedroom / lounge for his family who were dispersed among several local huts. We sat on chairs and a couch and ate by a single gas lamp in the corner of the room.
The food was very nice and consisted of barbecued chicken, spinach, and pap – a corn meal based food mixture with mashed potato consistency. Corn meal based foods are far more commonly eaten here than wheat or oat based foods. On our return walk to our resort, we had the chance to see the Milky Way amongst beautiful bright stars that had no interference from any man made light all the way to the horizons.
