Ok, so we wanted to travel back to Shit Towne...

by the scenic route. As I mentioned previously, it was to be a llloooonnnngggg day and we'd regret it more than a little bit when we eventually got home.

As expected, we were out of the sack around 6am, showered and dressed, into the kitchen for a cup of hot coffee, pack the bakkies and head off to Sani Pass again.

Knowing the route a bit better than the day before, we got up to the top of the pass after having a breakfast of leftover wors, steak and bread rolls about midway up. The last stretch was a little more iced up than the day before and more than once I felt the back wheels slide out a little bit before they bit the rocky road again. Although uneventful, it was still a challenge to get the bakkies to the top and it was good fun. None of the ladies wanted to try it even though we'd volunteered to coax them through the tricky bits. Opportunity wasted, I say...
At the Lesotho border, we were very quick to ask the "guard" not to stamp us out as we were travelling on to Katse Dam. The look on his face, though it could have been construed as blank to some, me included, should have said he thought we were fuckin' idiots and didn't know what we were letting ourselves in for.

Brian had said he'd done the road before, albeit a few years ago when he was still a bachelor, so we accepted that he knew what he was on about. Mistake. We were all in fine spirits as we drove the dusty roads, encountering our first snowfalls not 5km from the border. At some points, there were frozen streams and more than once we considered sliding down them on our backsides like we used to do when we were kids in the UK. The fine spirits lasted, as per Brian's observation, until 11am. The photos after that don't show anyone smiling.
The road condition was shite, loose gravel and rocks trying to throw the vehicles off the road at every turn, and at times we had to slow down to a crawl to make it through some stages. There were pedestrians, goats, sheep, cows and even the odd tree we had to look out for and avoid hitting.

If anyone doesn't know Lesotho, it isn't called "The Mountain Kingdom" for nothing. The only flat stretch we came across was the surface of the Katse Dam itself, everything else is built, or grows, on a mountain. The road winds its way up a mountain, down the other side and then up another mountain and down the other side...endlessly...I'm sure you get the picture. Unbelievably scenic, but a bitch to drive.
We should have been at Katse, by Brian's extimations, at around lunchtime. We ended up getting there at a little after 4pm!! We stopped off briefly to look at the dam wall from a vantage point, take a couple of photos, then we decided to forego "lunch" and just head out on the road again. From here onward though, it was tar and we expected to fly along sweetly. Wrong again. The road wound its way up a mountain, down the other side and up another mountain and down the other side...you get the picture again, I'm sure.
My only wish for this part of the trip was that we could have done it during the day. It was, by the time we got into the Maluti Mountains, night and though we could see the whiteness of the snow capping the mountains, it must have been a wonderful sight during daylight.

We eventually got to the Caledonspoort border post at around 7:30pm, tired and frustrated, but happy that we'd now be able to stretch the legs of our vehicles and get some serious mileage behind us and get home. At the border, I checked my little Garmin eTrex GPS and noticed that, from the time we'd left Sani Pass border post to the Caledonspoort border, we had done 427km. It calculated our average speed at just over 40km/hr. I'm sure you can now understand our frustration with the distance.

A quick stopover in Bethlehem for a Wimpy burger (the best fuckin' hamburger I've tasted for a long time, I assure you, having had just about nothing to eat all day while concentrating on the road) and we were back on the road again. I put my foot down and soon lost Brian in my wake. I still had to crop Patrick and Laura off at home, having picked them up to travel in one car on the Friday.

By the time I'd unloaded them and their gear and travelled the 10 or so kilometres back to my house, it was just short of midnight. I was tired, grumpy (more so than usual, some would say) and in dire need of a stiff scotch, a cup of tea and a shower, all in that order. Steph had been dozing in bed, but the barking of our dogs had woken her up and she came to meet me at the door. A lingering hug later, she poured me the scotch and the tea, commiserated at how tired I looked, then asked about the trip. Without going into too much detail, I gave her the highlights (and lowlights) then she went back to bed and I had a hot shower, then climbed into bed behind her. Home to mommy and into bed, or home to bed and into mommy, I hear you query...but I won't answer that and leave you wondering...



Would we do it again? Sani Pass, for sure, but the "Highway to Hell"...? Not a flying fuckin' chance...