Tuesday, October 09, 2007

Lesotho hideaway

There are three things that I think we are going to particularly enjoy about Lesotho, the clean air, the absolute quiet and the rugged beauty of the mountains. The next morning I wanted to go back up to the top of the ski slope to take a photograph of the resort but unbeknownst to us, there was another, heavier, snowfall. On the way up we stopped to take a photo of the stream shown below and the two herdsmen walked about a kilometer back towards us to say hi. In typical tourist fashion I thought that they want to beg for sweets which is a very common occurrence but not these two. They wanted to know what 'that' was, pointing to my camera. They had never seen a camera before so they insisted on me taking a photo of them.



The gumboots and the blanket are very typical local dress, you see everyone wearing it.



From the top of the ski slope looking back to the chalets, ours is the one in the middle. There are a few more to the left but they look quite lonely in relationship to the mountains. The resort is 3 years into a 15 year development plan so hopefully, by the time it is finished, it won't look quite so lonely.



I am particularly pleased with the following photograph because my camera managed to capture it without blowing out the highlights nor losing detail in the dark areas.



The road was particularly slippery here, in fact so much so that we weren't able to pull off from here and I had to reverse down onto the tracks before I could go forward. Seeing the snow and ice at this time of year and the chains that the trucks use in order to get up the roads leaves me in no doubt as to exactly why the road on this particular section is in such poor repair. Below is caron waiting patiently for me to stop buggering around taking photographs. Very chilly out, not only because of the snow but the wind was howling as well.



The return trip was uneventful and we had another late night sitting through the two remaining quarter finals. South Africa vs Fiji was very tense and at one stage it looked like Fiji might run away with it but the Springboks really pulled it together in the last 20 minutes and the final score looked way more comfortable that the game actually was. We got to half time in the Argentina vs Scotland semi before my eyelids couldn't stay open anymore.

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