12-Day Lesotho Highlands Tour with Sani Top and Katse Dam

Arrive at Moshoeshoe I International, twenty minutes from the capital, or cross by road at Maseru Bridge if you are coming overland. Maseru is a low, sprawling town of about a quarter of a million people that most itineraries treat as a formality. We give it an evening: the Basotho hat building, a look at the blanket shops on Kingsway, and a route briefing over dinner.

We start at Thaba-Bosiu, the flat-topped mountain Moshoeshoe I fortified in 1824 and never lost, walking up the Khubelu pass with a guide from the village below. Then north on the A1 through Teyateyaneng, where the weaving co-operatives still work to order, and up into the Maloti to Ts'ehlanyane National Park for the night.

A morning walk into the che-che, a stand of indigenous woodland that survives in this one high valley and almost nowhere else in the country. Then the climb: Butha-Buthe, the hairpins of the Moteng Pass, and on to Mahlasela at 3,222 metres, where the road tops out and Afriski's slope sits improbably on the ridge. Night at Oxbow.

East across the roof of the country, past the turnoff for Letseng, the highest working diamond mine in the world, and down into Mokhotlong, the last real town before the escarpment. In the afternoon we turn south for Sani Top and sleep on the rim at 2,874 metres, with the whole Drakensberg wall falling away below the windows.

A full day on the edge. We walk north along the rim toward Thabana Ntlenyana, at 3,482 metres the highest ground in Africa south of Kilimanjaro, going as far as the weather and the group want to go. Below the lip, the Sani Pass switchbacks drop 1,300 metres into KwaZulu-Natal. Afternoon in the village, evening at the pub that advertises itself as the highest in Africa.

The hardest driving day and the best one. Back through Mokhotlong, then west on the gravel through Linakaneng: eighty kilometres that take most of the morning, through cattle posts, river crossings and villages where the road is also the main street. It comes out above the Katse reservoir in the late afternoon, and the water appears without warning.

The morning at the dam: the guided walk into the wall itself, 185 metres of double-curvature concrete, and the botanical garden that holds the plants rescued from the flooded valleys. Then up the Mafika-Lisiu Pass to Bokong Nature Reserve at just over 3,000 metres, where a short walk reaches the lip of the Lepaqoa gorge. Back to Katse for the night.

South on the A8 to Thaba-Tseka, then west on the A3, the road that carries the finest sequence of passes in the country: the Blue Mountain, then Bushman's, then Molimo Nthuse, which translates roughly as God Help Me and was named by someone who had walked it. We stop at the Mohale Dam, the rockfill sibling of Katse, and stay the night above the water.

A shorter, slower day south through Ramabanta on a road that keeps climbing and dropping between villages, with time to stop for the initiation-season blankets, the sandstone kraals and whatever is happening at the roadside. Semonkong sits at 2,275 metres at the end of it, a trading post where horses still outnumber cars on a Saturday.

We ride or walk out to the falls in the morning, when the light is behind you and the spray column that gives Semonkong its name is at its highest. Anyone who wants to abseil the gorge wall does it today, 204 metres on a single rope, with the operator who has run it for years. Everyone else takes the path down to the plunge pool instead.

Down out of the high country to Malealea, in the Makhaleng valley, arriving in time for the afternoon ride. The ponies are the ones the village works, the guides are the men who own them, and the route drops to a gorge and a set of rock paintings that has no road to it. There is a walking version of the same valley for anyone who prefers their own feet.

A last morning through the sandstone lowlands, stopping at Morija for the museum and archives, the oldest in the country, and the dinosaur trackways in the rock above the mission. Maseru is ninety minutes further on. We aim to have you at the airport or the border by early afternoon, so book onward flights from late afternoon.