Seepage and other things...

Tomorrow will be the start of our second month in Lesotho. If our first month is anything to go by, we will be in for an amazing year! We have just returned from another fabulous weekend away. We headed off somewhat early on Saturday morning. We were planning to be in Katse Dam for the 11 o’clock tour, this meant rising at 5:30. Katse is the first of the dams in the Lesotho Highlands Water Project. It is in the centre of the country, deep within the Central mountain range, at 2000 metres and 4 ½ hour’s drive from Maseru. Matt couldn’t contain his excitement, a real test for him and Jeepy and lots of interesting dam facts!! He proceeded to tell me all about the ones he had already read up on, on our rather long journey! Despite this, the journey was spectacular. Some of the views even stopped Matt talking! On our way up, we crossed the Mafika Lisiu Pass (3090 metres) only to find three vans of party goers dancing to trance music at the viewpoint. As we looked on disapprovingly we realised that amongst this group were our teacher friends from Wales and the director of Dolen Cymru, Jon. He has been visiting Lesotho this last week and we had spent a couple of days with him in Maseru whilst he familiarised himself with the country. He certainly looked like he was finding his feet at the pass!

Matt and I slunk off 50 metres down the road to the Bokong Nature Reserve and had a sedate cup of tea overlooking our first view of the Katse reservoir. To give you some sense of scale, it was not until after a further 1 ½ hours driving that we actually caught sight of the magnificent dam. We caught up with the party busses at the visitors centre in time for the tour. Matt was most interested in the presentation about numerous facts and figures and I’m sure he will share with you if you come to visit. Please don’t let that put you off coming! The tour included a walk within the dam wall itself. Once we were snugly inside, we were introduced to “seepage”. The tour guide appeared to be trying to reassure us that the water coming out of every nook and cranny was normal seepage... although not everybody was convinced! After the tour, we parted from the party and headed to Katse Lodge for lunch, followed by a stroll around the botanical gardens (where we discovered the cure for cancer) then watched the sun set with a lager in hand.

Today we woke at a more leisurely time and headed back to Maseru. We stopped off at the Bokong Nature Reserve again for hike to a nearby waterfall. Given that we were out of breath just from walking up the few steps from the visitor centre to the car park we did well to walk for two hours at 3000 metres. We returned to Maseru after stopping off in Leribe for a cup of tea and a chat with three of the Welsh teachers. We met up with Jon and Helen and headed off to our favourite spot to watch yet another spectacular sunset. The trip was far more successful than one we attempted in the week, when it was raining and the traffic meant we missed the sunset.

I got back home after a pizza (I cunningly ordered the mustard one... they have some amazing flavour combinations here!) and have just spoken to my grandmother who was busy celebrating her 90^th birthday with cake and champagne! Technology is a wonderful thing!