Making friends in high places

The border patrol wasn’t really at the border, but it made more sense to have it here, at the base of the Drakensberg. The real border followed the watershed’s dividing line, 3000 feet above on the ridge: rain that fell on Lesotho’s side would find its way into the Atlantic, whereas South Africa’s water belonged to the Indian Ocean. Apparently, it was hard to find an employee willing to man the ridgeline post at 8000 feet above sea level.

I handed over my passport and watched as it was shuffled into a multicolor deck of passports belonging to the nine other women who were also part of this riding group. In the time that it took the border patrol to stamp each passport, we followed the customary getting-to-know-you conversations, chatting about first impressions of our horses’ personalities and previous riding experience and nothing of particular importance.

Before beginning my travels, I had been particularly excited to visit Lesotho because of its dramatic landscape and relative obscurity within the tourism scene. It was a tiny country that had been carved out of South Africa after King Letsie appealed directly to the British Crown for protectorate status in 1884 to avoid annexation of his land into the Cape Colony, which, for most other tribes, had meant subjugation and an erasure of culture. Because of that strategy, Lesotho’s culture and people, called the Basotho, had largely remained insulated from Western influence.

But topographically, ‘carved out’ was wildly inaccurate. Lesotho had been pushed upward by tectonic plate shifts and rolled into gentle, sweeping peaks and valleys bathed in emerald grass and striated with basaltic rocks. We now pushed our horses up those peaks with the help of a click and gentle nudge of the heel.

In our quiet march through No Man’s Land, the region between the ceremonial border and the real border up on the ridge, we slowly entered a fog. I followed closely behind Charles, our Basotho guide for the week, and watched as the fog drained the color from the horses behind me into a parade of dark silhouettes. Other than the clink of a bit and squeak of new leather, the valley was silent. But the horses did not seem to mind; they carried us over four river crossings, through a spongy bog, and straight up rock scrambles without (much) protest.

With my surroundings now shrouded in gray, I focused on the wool blanket wrapped around Charles’ shoulders. When blankets were introduced by European traders in the 1800s, they quickly became ubiquitous in Lesotho: at some point, Basotho became synonymous with 'the Blanket People.' Not only were blankets practical for keeping warm in the mountain climate, but they also served as a status symbol; lowly shepherds wore gray wool with hand-woven patterns, whereas the upper class wore the colorful Victoria England style. That blanket, a gift from Queen Victoria to King Lerotholi Letsie in 1897, was stamped with British symbols like the Crown Jewels, the Victoria Cross, and, oddly enough, airplanes.

We paused to eat our packed lunch at the ridge, but it was bleak. Now in the clouds, the wind whipped the air’s moisture sideways so fiercely that it seeped through my rain pants and jacket, down into my boots. If not for the shiny, first-day optimism blinding me from the discomfort of wet gloves and frozen toes, I might have asked to turn around.

On the other side of the ridge, we descended on a trail that curled around the mountain’s knuckles, toward a tiny hamlet of stucco rondavels with thatched roofs in the distance. And with our descent, the sun poured life into the valley. It pulled the clouds apart, just for a moment, just long enough to fracture its light through the last few raindrops and dazzle us with a sky filled with diamonds. The valley sang in the stillness: a pastoral windchime of sheep bells clanged in pleasant discordance, goats bleated and their shepherd hollered back, air parted quietly around my ears.

We neared the haven in the distance, which was named Thamathu. It was a community created in the mountains, from the mountains. We weaved through its network of footpaths, twisting around streams and cattle pens of stone until we reached a small lodge surrounded by a few rondavels.

The Basotho people live in rondavels, which are cylindrical buildings constructed from stone and covered by thatched roofs of dried reeds.

The plan was to stay in Thamathu for just one night, but when the sun retreated again after our arrival, it did not return for three days. In its absence, the storms blew, and we were stuck.

In my shared rondavel that night, I listened, really listened, to the sound of thunder moving through the mountains. Growing up in Washington, thunderstorms were a rare summer occurrence that felt like a special visit from an out-of-town guest. They were so uncommon that “Did you hear the thunder last night?” seemed to be a compulsory question to ask the following day. So there in Lesotho, 'Kingdom in the Sky,' the storm enchanted me wholly. This thunder did not roll, nor was it not muddied by distance. It came in discrete cracks that racketed like a drumline in my ribs. It was this pure crystalline sound that, had I not known, could have come from a lithospheric fissure in the basalt backbone of the mountains.

All the while, I stared at the kerosene lamp from under the cover of three wool blankets, watching its broad flame separate into two, morph and retreat into itself. It shed a yellow tint onto the curved rondavel walls, flickering warmly against the conical ceiling of reeds. I watched this performance, the lamp and the lightning with its orchestral ensemble of thunder and wind, until my eyes could no longer hold themselves open.

The thunderstorm continued into the morning until it wore itself dry. We took advantage of the weather window, tacking up the horses and riding out into the surrounding valley, where the scene was a tug between mountain and man. There were massive stretches of nonarable land bordered by fields that would give rise to wheat, sorghum, and maize in a few months. But these mountains, though impressive, were not imposing like the craggy Cascades back home. Rather, they were gentle and welcoming, much like the Basotho people who called them home.

The fields sank into a shallow valley, where they were bisected by a river that flowed furiously with the heavy rains. We followed the river downstream a few miles to where it had, over millions of years, carved the valley into a canyon. Early humans had taken shelter there; Bushmen had colored the canyon walls with the blood of an eland, giving life to buffalo and human figures that still danced on the rock today. Other archeological discoveries revealed that humans had been living in the area long before then, at least 20,000 years ago.

This Bushman art, painted with the blood of an eland, was estimated to be at least two thousand years old.

Even now, the canyon was peppered with life. Not that I could see that life, though. I heard whistles as we wove between the sheer walls that sounded like a bird’s song to my untrained ears. But after each whistle, Charles would tilt his head and respond in friendly Sotho trill. I followed his gaze upward to locate the camouflaged shepherd, never sure of where he might be: most were huddled beneath an outcropping, some were perched like a sentinel on a spire.

We returned to the lodge as the storm began to growl, taunting us with sheets of rain from across the valley. But we could not outrun it. Soaked, we gathered in the lodge, a single-roomed structure that was just large enough to accompany all of us if we arranged the chairs right.

A storm approaching from across the valley.

The riding group was made up of ten women, myself included, from 17 to 71 years old: two doctors, one judge, one full-time blogger, an aspiring architect, one corporate executive, one hotel manager, and two boat chefs. Some were married, some were not, some were in the midst of moving from the former to the latter. There were mothers, daughters, permanent fun aunts, homebodies and adventurers. And somehow, in all of these stages of life, each of us had ended up here in Lesotho, holding our wet socks to the fire.

As the rain wagged its finger at us from behind the Dutch door, we got to know one another. Played Uno. Built a card tower. Ate Basotho bread the size of a car wheel. Drank mulled wine and talked about choosing a career, balancing it with a personal life, the futility of regretting decisions along the way. At the risk of sounding super corny, talking with them filled me with a sort of inner peace that I had not experienced before. Sometimes, we have to make decisions – personal, professional, whatever – that feel like a set of doors on a game show: pick the right door and you win big, pick the wrong door and you get a heaping load of regret. I've been thinking about this more and more as the end of the Bonderman Fellowship slowly gets closer and I have to return to real life. But the variety in these women's life stories gave weight to the idea that maybe, just maybe, there isn't only one 'right' way forward. Maybe choosing the wrong door pushes you to become a carpenter so that you can design your own damn door. Who knows. I found an incredible amount of comfort in that.

With the thunderstorms preventing us from riding, we spent most of our time in the lodge, playing games and getting to know each other.

On account of the thunder, we spent two extra nights in Thamathu to avoid spooking the horses while riding to the next lodge. But I wasn’t upset by this, not with the friends I had found and the belly-aching laughs that filled the lodge. And anyway, the sun seemed to intervene briefly each evening, halting the storm for a moment.

I used this time to wander through the village and see what life was like in Thamathu. I picked a random path that brought me past a woman whose face was red with ochre. She, while bouncing the baby boy on her back, told me that it was meant to soften the skin. A few houses down, four boys crouched over a game of pebbles and glass on stone. I knelt with them, trying to understand the rules, but quickly lost focus each time a new boy approached; the three dogs of the house would snarl and snap at the newcomer, barking viciously while he snickered and swatted his shepherd’s cane through the air. It was a dangerous game to which the dogs did not seem privy. 

Local boys crouched around a game that I surmised to be a combination of checkers and connect four.

From what I could understand, the goal was to get three pieces of the same stone in a row on the gridlines.

A newcomer to the stone game playfully swatting at the three dogs, who were barking not so playfully.

I made my way back to the lodge once the cold started to bite at my fingers. As I trailed behind a young shepherd bringing his cows back to the pen for the evening, I heard a very clear, “Hello, how are you?” A young woman with a baby wrapped on her back gestured for me to come inside the fence to see her home. She introduced herself as Watsela, keeper of the local shop that sold things like vegetable oil and canned beans. She was quippy and sarcastic, and I liked her immediately. Noticing my slight shiver, she wrapped me in a Basotho blanket and continued to tell me about her life in Thamathu and how she wished that the government would finally deliver on its promise to bring electricity to the town. She also mentioned that the only road out of town, until very recent intervention by the Chinese (an unexpected champion of Basotho infrastructure, I thought), was more pothole than pavement.

In the middle of our conversation, Watsela's sister pulled me to a stone pen in the yard and, unprompted, began to demonstrate how to hop on an untacked donkey. For what purpose, I was not sure. She made two palatal clicks, a linguistic remnant of the Khoisan language, and swung a leg over its withers but the donkey skirted away. “Your turn,” she said to me.

I looked back at them hesitantly and considered my excuses. Finding none, I gave a blithe shrug, dug my feet further into my rubber Birkenstocks, and jumped. The sisters had a good laugh as the donkey spun me around the pen, but I held on tight. No casualties here.

On my way back to the lodge, I passed two locals, one on horseback and one on a donkey, who were heading to the hills to collect their cows for the night. With their English limited to short sentences, we chatted briefly in a conversation where I, fresh off the donkey, commended their ability to ride with neither bridle nor saddle, just ropes and mane. They galloped effortlessly into the hills.

My not-so-graceful spin on the donkey.

Watsela's sister, the instigator behind the donkey ride.

Me, wrapped in a Basotho blanket, and Watsela, the local shopkeeper, and her son.

Two shepherds, riding without tack, on their way to retrieve their livestock for the night.

The next evening, I waited for the storm’s usual intermission before I wandered through Thamathu again. This time, I only made it a few hundred feet before I was stopped by a Basotho man. A really talkative Basotho man.

His name was Liau, and he was counselor to the chief. He invited me into his family’s rondavel and I accepted – ‘stranger danger’ was a needless exercise in Thamathu, it seemed.

I stepped into the circular room, about the diameter of a giant sequoia, and sat on the bench next to Liau. Between us and his mother, who was coddling an infant across the room, there was a metal barrel glowing with flames. Here, above the tree line, the Basotho used a combination of dried cow patties and mud to fuel their fires. I watched as the smoke gathered in a hazy ceiling above our heads. His younger sister positioned a cauldron on top of the fire and filled it with water. Once it began to boil, she would stir in cornmeal to make ‘papa’, a local staple that yielded no taste, but certainly satisfied the belly.

A chicken roaming freely about Liau's rondavel.

Liau asked about my home and I rattled off the usual commercial landmarks: Starbucks, Microsoft, Amazon. He looked at me blankly, not registering any of these megacompanies. I was not entirely surprised by that response, given how remote this town was – there were no cars and no electricity, aside from a few solar panels. I asked if I could use his phone to look up a photo of Seattle, and the images shocked us both.

Downtown Seattle looked so shiny from the glow of his phone, so glitzy and polished. Puget Sound was sparkling, the Space Needle beamed as if it were some sort of urban lighthouse, and each skyscraper was lit up like a rectangular QR code made of high-wattage indoor lighting.

We scrolled through the Google images as a few chicks pecked around my foot, as the cool mountain air sucked away the cow-patty smoke like a magician yanking at a tablecloth. Seattle felt far. Really far.

Liau continued to scroll for a moment, then paused. He looked at me and asked, “Are there gangsters in Seattle?” I couldn’t help but laugh at the thought of gangsters running amok in Green Lake, especially in the way that he was probably imagining. I told him that, to my knowledge, gangsters were not warring in Seattle’s streets, however, there were certainly atrocities to be wary of: once, I unknowingly ordered a coffee that cost $9 (a purchase that incensed me into an unnoticed, temporary boycott of Sea-Fab Cafe). With that, Liau’s whole family looked at me in disbelief. They agreed: a $9 coffee was much scarier than gangsters.

I looked out the window, clouded from years of smoke, and figured from the dimming light that it was time to go. Liau wished me luck and health and happiness in my travels. I walked back to the lodge with a smile, reflecting on this total kindness from a stranger. I wished that when I returned to Seattle one day, I would bring that warmth with me.

Me and Liau

It was a bittersweet feeling when the weather cleared; we were to continue our horse trek out of Thamathu, away from our little lodge. Nearing the pass, I was struck with a tinge of melancholy as I turned back to look at the valley, now glowing under a cloudless sky. For the second time, I heard it sing.   

A lone rondavel in the mountainous village of Thamathu.