I’ve added a bunch of photos from my recent trip to Lesotho. Be sure to check them out in my Photo Galley.

Since I’m taking my “Christmas vacation” in February next year most of my December is spent in the office finishing up a projects before the year is over. Last week though I managed to get away for a quick trip to the country of Lesotho. The country is only a few hours away and is actually landlocked inside South Africa.

The plan was all set so Kelly, Amanda, and myself packed a backpack and sleeping bags and headed out for a few days of horse treking in the mountains of Lesotho.

Well, the trip got off to a pretty interesting start once we hit the border into Lesotho. When we pulled into the border we saw this ridiculously huge line of people filling out of the building. At first we were a little concerned, but soon realized that all they people in were walking into the country and since we were driving in we didn’t need to be in that line so we just followed the line of cars driving past everyone to border patrol. Once we get to the ONE person checking all the passports to let us through he of course says… “Where’s your stamp?” Yep, that huge line of about 150 people was where we needed to be. Ah, crap! So now we needed park the car and head to the back of that line. It was going to take hours.

Well, thanks to a bold move from Kelly and the fact that in Africa there’s rarely any type of systems in place we simply walked through the exit door and stood at the front of the line. We stood there waiting for someone to tap us on the shoulder and tell us that we just cut in front of about 150 people, but no one ever did. Yes, I did feel a little bad cutting in front of everyone, but we only had a couple more hours of daylight and I didn’t really want to find myself driving around in an African country having no idea where the next dirt road was going to take me. In case you were wondering, yes, that was me rationalizing it.

Well, after about 5 minutes in line we got our passports stamped to leave the country of South Africa, but unfortunately never got our them stamped once we entered the country of Lesotho. You’d think there’d be someone to stop you if you didn’t, but there wasn’t. We just drove right in. So, basically we entered the country of Lesotho illegally. That will come into play later when we tried to leave the country.

Posts to follow…

• Horse treking 12 hours through the mountains
• Swimming under a waterfall
• Sleeping in very unique African village

It’s once again time for the Thrive Africa printing press to fired up the Duplo and get to work on printing our curriculum’s for public schools. As we continue to expand into more schools the number of books we need to print is also increasing. Over the next couple days, we’ll be printing about 4,400 curriculums that will end up in the hands of kids in the village of Qwa-Qwa. This is pretty much double the amount we needed last term (August - December) and at about 55 pages per curriculum we’re looking at somewhere around 250,000 pages being printed. So, needless to say, I’ll be doing a little printing for the next few days.

We do most the printing here at the office then send them off to a printer in Johannesburg where they print the covers and bind it. Now usually, I can spread the printing out over a week, but since the country of South Africa pretty much shuts down in December and January as Christmas Season comes along I need to get all these done ASAP. I kid you not, some company’s we work with actually start their holiday vacation on December 8th! South Africa sure knows how to take a vacation.

So with the printer closing in the middle of December and with schools starting up in January I need to have everything printed in about… 3 days. Needless to say, I’ll be working some late nights over the next few days. I’m talking seeing the sun rise when I finally leave the office late night.

Bring on the Coke!