The Top of Southern Africa

I am just going to stop rating coffee until I find something that rates higher than zero.

Quote of the day: "Like the Fraser River, only pink" - Tig describing her mysterious juice at breakfast.

We pulled out of Oxbow for one of the World's great drives: The Sani Pass. If anyone reading this is an employee or shareholder in the Europcar car rental company, please stop reading now and skip ahead

to the bits about Durban.

We drove on two-lane fresh pavement, asphalt road that had been regraded (two 4-foot-wide strips of chunked-up asphalt with an 8-foot wide potholed and washboard gravel road), dirt road, rock road, mud road, and various things that really shouldn't be mentioned in the same sentence as the word "road". To call it a goat path would be disrespectable to the sheep that outnumber the goats by about 3 to 1. The Daihatsu did fine. If anyone calls you from Europcar rentals: the car is fine. That is our story. We are sticking with it.

Just outside of Oxbow is Afriski, Southern Africa's only ski hill. About 200m vertical, a single lift, a few little lodges about, and at least 100km of really shitty roads from the nearest population centre. Not Nancy Geene's next venture, but the potential terrain is huge, although tree skiing is not on the menu.

As the roads degraded, the mountains got larger, and the passes got higher. Mahlasela Pass is 3220m (10,650ft), Pass of the Guns is 3240m (10,700ft), and Tlaeeng Pass is 3260m (10,800ft), making it the highest road pass in Southern Africa ("road" here being used in the loosest sense).

From here we dropped down into Mokhotlong (2200m, 7200ft or so), the last frontier town before the Sani Pass. We stopped at a Chinese grocery where they were selling gasoline out of a washtub at the entrance to buy some provisions, and got out of Dodge just as a 6-year-old tried to jump into the back seat (oh, the customs hassles that would cause).

The next 65km was slow and rough, but the rewards were verdant valleys, endless peaks, waterfalls over columnar basalts, it got so you were tired of the majesty.

Note our road on the above picture, included for scale. The majority of traffic we passed were sheep, with goats and donkeys running a distant second and third. Over Kotisephola pass (3420m), and into Sani Top.

Sani Top is the border crossing back into South Africa, and is home to the Highest Pub in Africa, which is where I am currently ending a sentence with a preposition from.

Beer is best at 10,000 feet.