There are a few places I have always known I would go to eventually – one of which was Everest Basecamp. After years of talking about it – in August I finally booked my flights to visit the Everest Region in November 2022. As always, time off work is a very limited resource, and I wanted to maximise the 17 days I would have in Nepal – the easiest way to cut the trip down would be to reduce the standard two days to reach Namche and an acclimatisation day in Namche to a single one day approach. The easiest way to achieve this would be to simply go to a peak above 3300m in the Drakensberg the weekend before so that I would arrive pre-acclimatised.

My original plan was to head to the Chain Ladders, until Andrew pointed out that the drive to Afriski was actually shorter. Seeing as I had never been to Afriski, this seemed like a great idea. So I left work on Friday and headed off to Afriski with Tony.

We arrived in the dark during loadshedding in the rain – and took a while to find where the backpackers was actually located. The room key we were provided didn’t work, but one of the other rooms wasn’t locked, so we stayed in that room instead – making a point of not closing the door in case the lock started working again (which turned out to be a good call, as we would find a day later). After the rain stopped we walked to Reception to try and get the key situation resolved, and they told us to just use the unlocked room.

On a gloomy Saturday morning we set off, starting by ascending the A1 highway outside Afriski. We knew there would be some form of a trail on the top of the ridge, which Tony had carefully marked out and created a GPS track for. With my focus being on my upcoming trip to Nepal, I had spent very little time preparing for this hike – so little that I forgot to bring utensils to eat my tin of beans with!

The trail at the top of the ridge was very clear, but also very wet and muddy. It appears to be an old jeep track. The problem with driving a 4×4 off-road in the Lesotho Highlands is that the damage caused by a single such occurrence can take decades to recover. By contrast to hikers, where a route needs a fairly high volume of traffic before a trail forms, the ruts created by a jeep form very easily.

This track was surprisingly efficient for our purposes, leading most of the way to Matseng, a high point on the ridge off Namahadi (the highest point in the Free State). Walking along this ridge at 3200-3300m was great for the purposes of acclimatisation.

The weather was looking a bit ominous, but it held for now.

After completely misidentifying the peaks in front of me, I realised we were looking at the back of Mnweni. This was a welcome, albeit unexpected view.

We summitted Matseng, and after questioning which summit was higher, proceeded to also summit the lower subsidiary summit just in front of it.

From here we proceeded towards what we were primarily here for – Baneiseng (3362m, 7th highest mountain in Southern Africa).

This region is exactly why I rarely venture so far into Lesotho – there are plenty of high peaks, and if you go to the more southern parts of the country it can be really impressive – but a lot of the higher peaks of Lesotho are in relatively flat and uninteresting regions. The region behind Afriski is no exception to this.

There’s not much to say about this section of the hike – we gradually climbed along the ridge, tagging the saddles to determine Matseng’s prominence. It was neither the most interesting nor the most difficult terrain either of us had ever done.

Just below the summit we found the remains of what seems to have been a metal tower.

We tagged the summit on Baneiseng – the 7th highest mountain (7% definition) in Southern Africa. It was a fairly standard inland Drakensberg peak, with a not particularly impressive view. We had spent a lot of time above 3300m, so my acclimatisation goal had been achieved. Spending two nights at 3000m at Afriski didn’t hurt either.

To keep the route interesting, Tony decided to plan a line to descend down a different valley to complete a circle back to Afriski. This provided some variety for the route.

Don’t get me wrong – Lesotho is beautiful – but if I was trying to show the best parts of Lesotho, I wouldn’t bring someone to this region of the country.

As we continued down the valley, it started pouring with rain. We also soon discovered that there was a flooded river between us and the road. When a road is so close you could (but obviously wouldn’t) throw a rock onto the tar – but you can’t get to it, it is rather annoying! We decided to follow the river till the road crossed it, but after a fair amount of trying this, we gave up and crossed the river. It was deeper and stronger than I’d like, but we got across safely. This was a good call, as there was a large tributary that flowed in before the bridge, it would have also taken considerably longer to keep following the river.

Once we were on the road, the going became significantly easier.

The rain eventually stopped as we continued up the road. The river we had crossed is called the Motete River.

We had discussed climbing the two peaks behind Afriski that afternoon, since we got back around 1PM, but with it raining off and on, we decided not to.

Upon getting back to the backpackers, the room we had used the night before was now locked – fortunately we put everything in the car in case this happened. We found a different room that locked and stayed in that. After a shower where the hot water barely worked, I admittedly wasn’t overly impressed with Afriski Backpackers. We had the place to ourselves – I imagine it is run better when it is fully booked, there is no way they can make money with only two people staying here.

Around 8PM we were told we had been upgraded to a better room – with very little info and a lot of confusion we eventually found ourselves in a much nicer room. Why they hadn’t upgraded us earlier is anyone’s guess – the cost of hot water and lighting for an otherwise-empty room is much less than switching everything on in the backpackers if we were the only guests for the weekend.

On Sunday we woke up to a beautiful morning. We checked out early and drove up the hill to the peak behind Afriski.

The walk up this peak was trivial, but we were right there, so we may as well.

We then drove 2km further to do the peak with the towers – which looked higher but turned out to actually be lower.

This weekend was something mostly different, and while it had not been the hardest weekend in the mountains for either of us, nor the most dramatic – it was still good to see some new ground. We arrived back around 1PM on Sunday, and a few days later I would be off on a flight to Nepal – needless to say, that story will follow soon!