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