The coldest night of our lives

by Mike Henry (India)

Making a local connection Lesotho

I look through the crisp moonlight to the other side of the canyon. I don’t see the three dark-cloaked figures anymore. I feel a sense of relief; I won’t have to deal with strangers in the night in this cold, remote, rugged canyon. I look down at my boots, then back up. The three are right in front of me. They’ve circled the canyon, impossibly fast, and they want to talk. I always enjoy finding myself in those “how the hell did I wind up here?” situations. They force you to think through where you’ve been, and try to draw a line where the journey started. You could say that we destined ourselves to wind up in that Lesotho canyon when we signed a contract to work for two years in Zambia, which we’d barely heard of; or as kids, when we first looked at a map of the world, and found the idea of exploring it to our liking. Really, though, this trip started with a couple of guys standing around in the office kitchen, talking about the mountains and reading a single magnificently exciting sentence from a guidebook. The sentence didn’t stick, but the word did: Lesotho. We had to go. So we bought tickets to Joburg, sourced cold weather gear in our country where it never snows, looked at some maps, called in a few favors, shoved a week’s worth of food into packs, and hit the trail. The views were stunning, the water refreshing, the skies clear, the scale of it all unimaginable. We learned how to navigate encounters with Sotho herdsmen and their sheep, dogs, cows, donkeys. Four days in, basking in the glory of it all, we got profoundly off track and turned up a side-valley to correct our mistake. The light was perfect as we walked between the narrow, steep valley walls, but the sun was going down. The problem was that this tributary was crowded, by Lesotho standards, and we needed to find an out-of-sight place to camp very soon. We decided to scramble through the brush up a narrow gulch sliced by a stream, camping on the ridge up top. We set off just as darkness fell. Halfway up the canyon, full darkness now, they appeared: three cloaked figures, waving to us, yelling something in Sotho. We kept hiking, but they came around the canyon to meet us, and there we were, face to face with teenage herdsmen in cloaks. They asked us to stay the night with them. We considered the situation: we’re in the most remote corner of a remote country, with one phone between the two us and no service to use it, dog-tired from a long day, cold, unable to speak the language or even see the trail, looking like guys who’d been out in the mountains for a lot more than four days. In short, it seemed like high time to spend the night in a hut. We said yes. So we followed these guys across a mountain ridge in the middle of the night, stumbling across huge, slippery drop-offs, feeling our way over invisible sheep tracks. We reached the hut, encircled by hundreds of sheep staring at us accusingly, and shoved our bodies and packs into the four-foot door. The hut was cramped and freezing, with 2 stone benches, a central clearing for a fire, a 50-kg sack of pap flour in the corner, and, somehow, a cellphone. We were guests in the truest sense, taking it as it came. Our night in the hut passed in a hypnotized daze; there was no thinking, only feeling. I remember the thick smoke filling the non-ventilated dwelling, the low-voiced Sotho discussions, the mingling smells of smoke and sweat and dogs and stone, the scratch of the wool blanket, the bitter cold seeping through the doorway, the relief of the gray dawn. We got out of there alive, bleary-eyed, and hit the trail. Sometimes you have an experience you realize will probably never happen again. You don’t know what it meant, but you’re glad it happened, and despite coming out with more questions than answers you come out a little wiser. Or at least a lot smellier.