Above the Clouds

| Tweet Today we drove to the northern part of the country, passing small villages, rural fields and many sheep and cow herders. Walking seems to be the preferred form of transportation and one always has to keep an eye open for people on the side of the road. Driving can be challening yet fun. Some of the roads were full of pot holes – or perhaps potholes is not the appropriate word – craters might be more sufficive! So you come up on a crater in your lane, a slow mini van full of people, an aggresively passing car coming the opposite direction and no shoulder to pull off on – yes, driving here can be challenging!

Ok, on to the event of the day. We were pulled over at a routine traffic stop in the northern mountainous part of the country. The police looked at the registration info on our windshield and promptly informed us that we had expired registation and needed to pull over and stay put. We found our rental car information but did not have a working cell phone. One of the policemen tried to call the phone number for us but had no luck. We just said down and waited to see what would happen here.

While waiting, the police pulled over a bad ass large land rover. They were not Africans but rather Chinese and they were speaking the local language. The conversation became heated with both the driver and the main policeman yelling at each other. The driver walked out and they continued talking. The driver walked back to his vehicle and made a phone call on his cell phone – he then walked back towards the police. They didn’t like that – one police started trying to pull down his pants and began hitting him.

The driver lunged away and returned to his vehicle. This time he came out brandishing a fancy looking shiny pistol. There were 7 or 8 police present – they started shouting, one police reached for his gun and waived it in the air. One of the police snuck behind the driver and attempted to tackle him. Another police grabbed the gun and they pushed the guy to the ground and started beated him viciously. It became mob like – the two other occupants rushed out of the vehicle at the police – one big dude in a pink shirt rushed the police.

As soon as this happend I rushed to the safety of one side of our vehicle. This all happened within seconds. I yelled at Syy to get in the car. The passenger side of our vehicle was directly next to all the action. We slammed the doors and pulled out in a skid leaving dust and rocks flying behind us.

We pulled into the next town to collect our thoughts and get gas and screaming police cars raced by us in the opposite direction. Then we saw a police car with “traffic enforcement” written on it driving past us. We decided to try and get the forms faxed or emailed to us – but with such slow Internet and phone problems we didn’t get this resolved for 2.5 hours. Crazy

| Tweet We headed out of the lodge today on a long meander to a river. Along the way we picked up 8 children who were delighted to see us and show us around their village. They accompanied us down a steep cliff to a huge valley below. Along the way we met a sheep and goat herder dressed in native attire. Eventually we reached the bottom of the valley and the river. It was wasn’t the cleanest water in the world – but it was running and most of the kids stripped down and jumped in.

We sat by watching them and then all of the sudden the kids started screaming and pointing. One of the smaller guys had wondered a bit upstream and apparently got caught by the current and was sucked under. It became clear that he did not know how to swim and he was unable to reach the surface. He was obviously drowning. I jumped in and reached him just in time to see his panicked face well below the surface. I snatched up his little body and quickly deposited him on one of the dry rocks on the riverbank. He was so scared, gasping in air and did not go back in the water for the rest of the day.

One of the girls was so full of energy – as tough as nails. She was the first one to jump into the water despite the water being quite cold. She was the only one without shoes and walked the entire distance – and the valley was covered with thorny plants. We asked her if she was ok and she just smiled.

We watched the sun go down and took a bunch of pictures with the children on the edge of the cliff overlooking the entire valley and mountains in the distance. One of the girls was full of energy – We bought the children several large drinks to share. I told them to take care of the little guy who almost drowned.

Lesotho is a special place; it is unknown, underrated, unbelievable – remote, rugged and rural.

| Tweet Just returned from a fantastic outing on the horses to see ancient Bushman cave paintings. We rode through expansive fields of mostly corn until we reached a viewpoint overlooking an impressive gorge. From here it was on foot down a very steep rocky trail to the first of the caves – called “echo cave”. It was obvious why this cave took its name after we shouted ourselves hoarse, practicing our new found Lesotho words including “dumella” – a greeting. This word came bouncing back at us from across the canyon.

The real highlight of this outing were the cave paintings. The first cave featured paintings that archeologists have dated back thousands of years – these types of paintings go back 27,000 years ago but the ones we saw were much younger. Amazing. Blood and other dies were used and today still showed bright red. Unfortunately the paintings within reach had faded fast as the guides loved to touch them. The ones out of reach were still very red.

We brought litchi fruits with us – our guides spoke a few words of English but we determined they had never enjoyed these fruits before. We had to show them how to peel off the outside and eat the fruit. “Mmmms” indicated their enjoyment followed by “where can buy this?”!

On the return I had visions of myself and my horse arriving at the lodge – rearing up high pawing the air announcing our arrival. Alas this wasn’t to be – my horse was not young and I had a hard time even getting it into a slow trot. It seemed more interested in eating grass then walking.

| Tweet We met a local in the nearby village and had an hour tour. It is nice to be able to talk to the locals in English – this is not always something you can do around the world. The village is very spread out and home to about 500 people. The homes are traditional, mostly stone and mud with thatched roofs collected from wild grasses and reeds that grow nearby.

The village is overseen by a chief – he is elected for a lifetime. Currently there is no chief as the last chief died and his family has all moved away. Elections will be held in 2 weeks (by raising of hands in a central gathering place) to elect a new chief. When the chief takes office he moves his family into a sub set of the village where he has his own homes and land.

Several villagers brew their own beer – they grow their hops on site. These are only grown during certain times of the year. We are at about an elevation of 2000 meters and snowfall can be plentiful during the winter starting around May. We smelled their production – it was definitively beer and all contained in 750ml wine bottles!

Cooking is done with a mixture of cow dung and firewood. It is always interesting to see what villagers grow. Here it is a lot of corn, sorghum and some potatoes and a bunch of fruit trees – mainly peaches and apricots. There are even prickly pear cactus growing here – the locals eat the fruit. I told them you can eat the young leaves after removing the thorns. They were intrigued to hear this.

| Tweet Greetings from Malelea Lodge in the remote hinterlands of the “mountain Kingdom” – the landlocked county of Lesotho (not pronounced how its spelled, rather phonetically you say “Lesootoo”). The country has the highest mountains in Southern Africa and receives significant snowfall at the higher elevations in the winter. There is even a small ski resort in the eastern part of the country!

We drove in from South Africa crossing the border at Maseru – the capital city. Upon giving my passport to the South African immigration officer – he looked it over for a few minutes then frowned and said, “come with me”. He led me into a room and said, “you are not here legally – how did you enter the country?” “Umm through the airport,” I told him. “No you don’t understand,” he continued, “there is no stamp” – oh, that’s easy. I pointed him to the orrect page with the SA stamp and he retreated back into his small square.

The weather forecast at Malealea Lodge is merely a rock hanging from a rope! When the rock is wet, its raining, when the rock is hot its sunny, when the rock is white it is snowing and so forth. Oh and when the rock is missing – the dog has it!

It is about a 6-7 hour drive here from Jo’burg. The last 100 or so clicks are on very small pot holed roads. Lots of people walk on the roads here, public vans continuously stop and take up half of the left lane, not to mention oncoming cars that aggressively pass. You have to continuously be aware when driving. The last 7 clicks into the lodge are on a rutted dirt road crossing over a narrow pass which affords spectacular views of the valley way below…not to mention all the surrounding mountains.

No chance to upload any pictures or videos although we have taken LOTS of each! Will add those to the posts as soon as we get some stable Internet and a break

| Tweet We arrived in South Africa with no plans. A quick scan of the airport revealed a number of name brand car rental companies – so we beelined for the only Internet Cafe we could find and used one of the online car reservation companies. Within 40 minutes of making our reservation we had signed countless forms and were sitting in our almost brand new Nissan Sentra. This was the only “automatic” transmission vehicle we could find at the entire airport.

We headed out and quickly took the wrong highway – we turned around and after some stressful driving and lots of traffic found ourselves in central Johanessburg. We tried to find the N1 Highway but spent nearly 2 hours within about a 2 mile radius essentially driving in circles trying to find this freeway. We stopped many times and asked for directions but the spoken word was always different depending on who we asked. One guy ran up to us while we were parked at a light and stuck his head in the window looking around. I quickly moved my phone to the floor.

Somehow we ended up on the N1 heading south after much hair pulling and yelling in frustration. We hadn’t eaten at any fast food restaurants for about 3 years. Finding a KFC in a small town but not much else in the way of food, we hesitantly entered the front door. Finding no utensils we ate our coleslaw with improvised chopsticks – bending two ends of a straw together.

We reached Blomfontein in the late hours of the night. We were utterly exhausted and were barely able to stay awake at the wheel. I was hitting myself in the head and playing music loudly with windows rolled down. After the 20 hour journey from Thailand we were zombies.

As is the case when you settle for your first choice of lodging in the throws of exhaustion you nearly always get a less than ideal situation. In this case it was expensive, dead bugs in the bed, and swarms of mosquitoes in the bedroom and bathroom! We spent what little energy we had closing the windows and pounding mosquitos against the walls and ceiling with an aggression we didn’t realize we had at this ungodly hour.
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| Tweet We jetted from Bangkok to Addis Ababa yesterday on Ethiopian Airlines. I wasn’t too impressed with the two planes we were on – they were just plain old. Both times I used the restroom the broken doors swung in on me even though it said “occupied” on the outside. The video/light control console was broken on both flights and on the second flight my seat had a scant view of the video screens. But, they just joined Star Alliance in late 2011 so more miles baby!

We dropped out of the Ethipian air space into Addis Abbaba to a brisk yet clear morning. Dry countryside and rocky outcroppings surrounding the dusty city. We will be back in early February for more exploring as our stay here was limited to the airport. As we left the airport and flew south, a huge unfinished road formed a red line on the land – it was paved and then it wasn’t. Lake after lake winked at us from the ground as we flew over – catching the suns rays directly as they flashed us in the sky. Large expanses of dry desert went on for miles – no roads, nothing. Land ripe for exploring in a Humvee. More lakes showed as we flew over the Great Rift Valley.

Upon seeing the jagged summit of Mt. Kenya I knew we were approaching Mt. Kilimanjaro and Mt. Meru.

It was awesome to fly by the western flanks of Mt. Kilimanjaro – our pilot even dipped the wings so we could have a better view. This is the roof of Africa – the highest point on the entire continent. The upper 1/3 of the mountain was completely covered in snow. It was 12 years almost to the day earlier that I found myself standing on the summit. The summit day was not an easy one – I found myself so intoxicated by the altitude that I ended up in a HAP bag (high altitude pressure) bag and while I was incapacitated at the 18,500 foot Sheera Plateau two guys close by died because of Pulmonary Edema brought on by the high altitude.

Once we approached South Africa we saw green and lots of it. Fields and fields. No visa forms to fill out – just a short line and a stamp and we were on our way!

| Tweet Every year around this time the villagers drain one of the local ponds into an adjoining rice field. This takes all night – a couple guys stay up all night with the pump.

Then in the very early morning about 15 people gather at the banks for a mud infused assault on the fish. This is not clean work – they jump into the mud, sinking up to their waists and crawl around with small nets and buckets collecting all the fish.

By mid morning its a small party at the pond. A number beer bottles are strewn about, a small fire cooks a few of the fish, and mud is being flung about! Young and old participate in the fun.

By mid day they have collected as many as they need and start draining the water back into the pond. It looks like we will be eating fish for the next few weeks!

| Tweet I’ve been coming to our village in Eastern Thailand every at least once a year for the past 10 years (we own property next to the village). Things change so fast here. In the last 4 years we now have land line service and a 10mb Internet connection (that’s 4x as fast as we have at our place in California). Oh and we have 24/7 running water. Prior to this we had to walk 5 minutes to the local pond, turn on the pump for water and then walk back over and turn it off when finished. We still do not have hot water and on some nights taking a shower is a frigid proposition. We still take showers with small buckets from large water urns but at least we have the option of using running water if we like.

The village has shrunk in size – now there are only 2 homes rather than the 7 or 8 we had a few years ago. There are only 4 full time residents down from the nearly 30 of a few years ago. The reason for this is that the villagers sold their land in the village and moved out to the dirt road that leads to the village. They built their homes from scratch – all western styled rather than the typical Thai style homes you see in this area (raised on stilts, tin roof, mostly open to the air).

So now instead of empty fields surrounding the dirt road there are now a number of homes. Oh and we had our first Farang (western Caucasian person) sighting ever in the village. A German man is building a house on the outside of the village and comes into the village to shop at the one small market. Haven’t yet had a chance to speak to him – but saw him here several times.

Animals used to be kept in the village – but that’s all gone now. We used to kill a pig for New Years, preparing each part of the animal in a variety of dishes – now we just buy an already prepared pig and BBQ it.

Those are just a few changes in the last few years – imagine the changes over the past 30 years here.

| Tweet Our niece Puk Boong shows up promptly every afternoon around 4pm dressed in her school uniform. She is attending a private school where English is taught at a younger age than a public school. The scope of her English so far is in song – she can vaguely sing the words to a number of songs – and has perfect tone. Today, the 29th of December apparentlywas Christmas Day at her school. She had to wear the “christmas” uniform and happily performed a number of Christmas songs from her Christmas song book. Apparently December 25th has no bearing on “Christmas” day at this school!

Seeing the large green area was cut to the ground, I inquired as to the reason. This large area grows Pandan a green plant used as flavoring – especially with the bugs we fry up every morning. During the floods in northern Thailand there was a big demand for fresh veggies from the drier south and this plant was cut down and sold in small bags. It will start growing back soon.

There’s as much to do or as little to do in the village. Today was a do nothing day – essentially hang out under the Thai style house in the hammock, drinking Spy Wine Coolers. Wandered over to the garden for a few minutes to nibble some fresh veggies and then back to the hammock. Didn’t even have the energy to walk down the path through the garden to our nieces house for lunch. Did find a dragon fruit in the refrig and split that about 10 ways with the village kids & their friends.

If you wait long enough eventually food just shows up. That is my philosophy on food on lazy hang out in the hammock days. Fresh corn just appeared on our porch and some sticky rice in bamboo. Puk Boong told me not to eat so fast! Nice. The bubble jar just appeared – now we are blowing bubbles. Time to wrap this up.

Puk Boong to the left with her friend from school: