Traditional bushmen rondavels were made all of stone and had a low entrance. The were so low that I couldn’t get in unless I slid on my tummy in the mud. The entrance is low to make it easy to defend. Any animal or bad guy coming in has to duck its head and the bushmen can hit it with a club.

We also learnt how to play the shepherds game. It is a bit like the noughts and crosses and connect 4 games.  You have 12 pieces and you try and get 3 in a row. If you do, you can take off one of the other players pieces.

King Moshoeshoe I:

After that we did a dirt track to the Kome Caves. The caves were another overhang but in the 1800’s the people had made some walls out of mud/clay. There are three grandmothers that still live there! One is 89, one is 84 and one is 64. We were allowed to go into their houses. The biggest house had a real bed, a shelf of food and a gas cooker. But in the other houses the grandmothers slept on mats on the floor. There were some bushmen paintings on the ceiling, but because of all the smoke from the fires, they have disappeared. There were lots of children there, from Maseru, who were learning how to cook over fire. I tried to use the grinding stone, but it was hard. We also learnt that there were some cannibals that lived near by. Cannibals are people who eat other people!

On the way back to Maseru, we stopped at a weaving place. There were lots of wall hangings and we saw a guy making a floor mat. He said it would take 3 weeks to finish.

Then we went to Liphofung Cave. The guide showed us the national flower of Lesotho. It is called Aloe Polyphylla. It is spikey like a cactus but has a spiral. If the spiral is clockwise then it is a boy flower, if the spiral is anti-clockwise then it is a girl flower.

Then the guide took us to the caves. The cave was a big overhang of rock. It was very sacred to the San Bushmen who lived there 30,000 years ago. There were lots of rock paintings. There were 4 tall men but they had antelope heads and hooves. There were pictures of them hunting eland, which is an antelope that is as big as a cow! They used bows and arrows with poison made from plants and scorpion or snake venom.  The poison would go to the eland’s liver, which was good as the rest of the meat would be fine to eat. The hunters had to get to the animal quickly when it died to take out the liver and bury it before any other predator ate it.

There was also a picture of a devil. The colours of the paintings were either red – made from ochre, black from coal and white from bone marrow, from the inside of bones.

Then we went into some rondavels. Did you know it is round because if a snake enters, it goes all the way round the circle and out the door. If there was a corner the snake would coil up there.  The rondavels are decorated with mud/clay and cow poo! Inside the rondavel we saw a traditional bed made from sheep, cow and goat skins. We also saw some clothes, the chief had a cloak made of three otter skins. All the clothes were from animal skins. The little girls had a short skirt, and that was it. A family would have one rondavel for sleeping and one for cooking. We saw lots of pots and bowls and a grinding stone.

It was very interesting. Then we went to a campsite on a road that did not look like a road. But the taniwha handled it!

We camped for the night at the top. There were lots of dogs and sheep with cow bells round their necks. There were 4 boys that just watched us. There were round houses with a thatched roof called rondavels.

The next day we went to Monks Cowl where you can go for walks in the Drakensburg Mountains. The mountains are massive and look like a giant’s teeth. We didn’t have time to do a walk but we watched some ladies make baskets out of dried grass, plastic bags and copper wire. There was also a guy who was painting little clay/cement animals.

Then we went to Falcon Ridge. There were lots of birds of prey. They did a display where the birds would fly and then come back for food, even catching it in the air!  We saw an owl, a noisy fish eagle that picked its food off the water, a black hawk and a peregine falcon. There were also some other birds in cages, like a cape vulture and a secretary bird.  The falcon was my favourite because it went really fast next to us, (400km/hr!)

Did you know: The owls hunt at night and falcons hunt in the day, otherwise they would kill each other, because they are after the same food. The owl flies silently, and you could blindfold it, and it would still find its food because its hearing is so good.  When a black hawk hatches, if there are 2 eggs, the first hawk will kill the second one. But fish eagles will keep all birds in the nest. When a hawk or eagle lands, they land feet first.