The three of us had an amazing experience of riding and engaging with the experiences of Lesotho over the long weekend. It is a country of dramatic scenery and epic proportions. I wouldn’t be surprised if we had a total altitude change (ascents and descents) of around 10,000 metres. You spend so much time going up and down: valley after valley and mountain after mountain. It is simply how the lie of the land is.
We did some roads and routes where the ‘road’ did not exist on any map or even on Google Earth. Sometimes our average speed was 30 to 40 km/h for hours on end. But we found communities in every corner. No one around, and then suddenly a heard of sheep and a shepherd.
We might want to think that folk living in these spaces are poor. It depends how we define our own wealth I suppose. There is a lot of successful subsistence farming and living going on: Fields of maize and cabbages and barley and spinach…. Herds of sheep and cattle and chickens (flocks in their case) for food stuff, donkeys and horses for transport, perennial rivers for free water, land with no rates and taxes to put your – some very decent and neat – little house up.
I met a local man in a guesthouse we stayed in one evening. Doing my usual thing of asking too many questions when in an interesting and intelligent conversation, I discovered he worked for a NGO with US Aid funding to uplift the lives of Lesotho children caught up in malnutrition, child abuse or were orphans. I brought up the topic of the subsistence communities we’d passed through. He called these people rich. I agreed with him.
We are wrapped up in our lives, many of us constantly aspiring for more. I suppose they are wrapped up in their lives, and probably also constantly aspire for more. The nature of man. We are born into most of what we are and have.
But there was a simplicity there, without it being poverty.