The Drakensburg: Plateau Mountains, San Paintings and Spitting Cobras

After a couple of days again, back in Durban, we headed off to the Drakensberg Mountains. This is where South Africa borders the constitutional monarchy of Losotho. It also has some of the highest points in southern africa, and a spectacular setting to do some hiking (if we had planned better or had more time).

While in Durbs, we decided to take in a western movie and settled on Ghost Rider, we would not recommend it, and along the lines of our Argentinian movie going exerience, the popcorn was just not the same as back home. We also took time to watch some surfing and think about our towels and Justine's shirt which we had left hanging on the line in St.Lucia.

Time in the Drakensburg was well spent. We spent one day on a brief tour of Lesotho, by climbing high up the Sani Pass road on a series of switch backs that would rivel many of the roads in the Yukon for roughness. The tour was interesting, as we had lunch overlooking the mountains of Lesotho and also spent time visiting a local village woman. She baked some bread which we tried, as well as some local beer. It was quite good and we spent time learning about her life, without a husband and many kids, and how she only lives in the high mountains in the summer to sell wares and will travel by foot down the valley for the winter months.

Lesotho is quite remote and many of these people have to travel a day just to get supplies from the cities. As we learned on our last day, the reason it takes a day is mostly because local transport can be interesting. True local, local transport are Mini Bus Taxi's. These are little mini vans which should probably hold only about 12 at the most, but we were in one with 21 people. They cram as many people in as they can and they only leave when full. We spent 4.5hours waiting for one to take us 20km down the road. We waited that long because they were waiting for another mini bus taxi from Lesotho. All in all to get back to Durban it took us about 12 hours to go about 200km, and that was just a small taste of what these people have to do in order to travel.

Other time was spent hiking into the mountains of the Drakensburg to take in Sani Bushman paintings of animals and people dating back thousands and thousands of years. We had to hike to the rocks where the paintings were, and on route, a fellow backpacker almost stepped on a snake. It ended up being a spitting cobra, which is able to accurately spit its venom up to 3m. Luckily, there were no issues and we got away with just a close view of this attractively coloured snake! The paintings were beautifully drawn in different shads of red, white and black and depict humans in many different forms of dress and daily life. You are able to walk right up to the paintings and seeing them with the dramatic backdrop of the mountains of South Africa was really a beautiful sight.

After all this fun and hiking, we had to call it to a close a day early as we managed to convince the Baz Bus to carry our towels without us to Durban. We went back to Durbs a day early to get our towels, only to find that locating our towels in the bowels (haw haw) of the backpackers was harder than we thought. Finally, the day we were to board a bus to Cape Town the towels were found, only for Justine to realise she hasn't seen her brown shirt in two weeks... not sure what happened to that. Ahh the joys of travelling.


Boarded a bus to Cape Town and we were reminded of something else interesting we have seen, fake trees. They have cell phone polls that they decorate, rather well in fact, like trees. Until you get up close you can't tell they are fake, and even then, surprisingly, they aren't tacky, they are just a little taller than normal trees.

Now you may ask, why are we heading back to Cape Town????

Plans have changed, Madagascar is going to be another time for us, instead we are heading north to Namibia. The flight to Madagascar was over 1000 USD each, and we have decided to channel that money into a 3 week tour from Cape Town through Namibia, Botswana and ending in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe. Not sure if a 3 week tour is for us, but we are told that travelling Nambia and Botswana either requires a lot of time or a lot of money, which seems to be the case for most things in Africa, but a little more so there. Not wanting to deal with buying/renting a car, we decided to relax and let a tour do the touring for us.... so we head out on April 15.

Blogs may be few and far between, or not at all (truth be told we know nothing about the tour we are taking, so this could get interesting).... But the map is updated so at least you should know where we are, even if we aren't posting.

Happy Easter to all .