Lesotho: Land of lovely ghosts

Much has changed in the kingdom of Andrew Unsworth's childhood, but the haunting heart of it still beats the same

We all do it or dream of it - returning to the places of our childhood. Such attempts to relive the past can backfire though, because, as Joni Mitchell sang, over time "they" do tend to "pave paradise to put up a parking lot".

They put up the Maseru Holiday Inn parking lot decades ago on a field I once played on, and now there is a bypass road between that and the Caledon River below, where in winter we would cross from side to side without a passport.

Recently, I went back to Lesotho to look at a few places I remembered from my childhood there, but more to mark the 50th anniversary of its independence, an event I well remember.

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I started in the Free State border town of Ladybrand, where we'd lived in the mid '60s in a large, sandstone house near the railway station.

The house was said to be haunted and I saw the ghost one night, but my dad told me I had sunstroke and to shut up. It's still there, that house, its vast plot of land swallowed up by buildings and yards.

This time, however, I stayed in the beautiful Station House B&B with the attached Living Life restaurant, which made the best rosti I have ever had, and beef strips in a creamy mushroom sauce to dip them in. It's about 200m from my old home, and once housed the stationmaster in a smaller stone home.

I was travelling with local farmer and tour guide Jan Oberholzer of Sunflower Tours, with whom I also happen to have gone to high school. We have both aged remarkably well. He takes private tours into the Mountain Kingdom and this was a very private one indeed.

In Ladybrand, we visited Lesotho historian David Ambrose (in another golden stone house) and we chatted for hours over our Lesotho days.

Maseru has changed far more since my school days, but the sandstone English Primary School is still there. I walked through it with the principal, who was curious to know what had been there when I'd attended. As they had built classes on our sports field, tennis court and front garden, not much, I told him.

Back then, we'd only had the L-shape of five sandstone classrooms and a modest hall, where we'd had assembly, sang God Save the Queen and sometimes held concerts. Everything had, of course, shrunk terribly, and I was overwhelmed by nostalgia, even for being left standing at the gates all afternoon when my dad forgot me.

The original iconic Basotho Hat building (a simple, double-storey rondavel with a thatched roof almost down to the ground in imitation of the hat), which my father designed in the 1960s, is burnt and gone, replaced by a replica but they got the pitch of the roof wrong, too steep. It no longer dominates the entry to town as it once did.

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After inspecting more and being either impressed or horrified by how the city had grown, we left on the old road out of town, past the imposing cathedral towards what was once the idyllic Botshabelo leper settlement, where I'd first lived 7km outside of Maseru: it's long since been overtaken by suburbia but I found the row of old government houses of my memories, now most neglected.

In the '60s, Maseru's Kingsway was the only strip of tarred road in the kingdom, now the excellent roads reach places we'd only heard of or could only reach with great effort: you can even do the Sani Pass or cross Lesotho to Matatiele in the Eastern Cape on tar.

This has shrunk the country, and we were soon in the university town of Roma, where we were booked to stay in the Trading Post Lodge with Ashley Thorn and his wife Jennifer. I'd been at Maseru Primary with Ashley, whose family has run and owned the Trading Post since the 1870s.

Over an excellent bottle of single malt, we passed an evening reminiscing and again talking about Lesotho's rich history woven with the work of the Basotho people, missionaries, traders, and white families who predated and outlived colonial times.

The Trading Station, which sold absolute basics to remote villagers, is no longer on the main road and people now shop in Maseru malls, and the old homes and cottages that housed the Thorns for generations now accommodate tourists and mountain bikers.

They were built from stone quarried from a nearby sandstone-topped mountain, the gash cut by quarrying still visible. The pines, oaks and plane trees between them are now old and stately, the simple gardens contain hardy shrubs and flowers once found in all Lesotho gardens. I felt very at home.

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The next morning we drove on to Malealea, further south in the Thaba Putsa range. It was raining and the countryside was green with maize growing tall, pumpkins running rampant and livestock looking as pleased as the people. "Khotso, Pula, Nala" (peace, rain, plenty) we kept saying, but there was less of the first as we topped the Gateway to Paradise Pass and slipped down into the valley below.

Malealea Lodge is another former trading post, now run by Glenn Jones as a popular point for pony trekking, hiking and mountain biking. A collection of rondavels and huts, it sits on a mountain spur with views of the misty, pine-framed mountains and the valley, just inviting you to chill.

We then drove to the cultural centre of Morija, a former royal village that became a French mission station in the 1840s. Bridgette Hall's Morija Guest House stands on a ridge overlooking the village with its steepled church and printing works, which has served Lesotho since 1874.

Spotting a copy of Murder at Morija, a monumental 2003 book by the late Tim Couzens, I asked if she had read it. "Read it?" she replied. She'd translated the French documentary records for Couzens! Ashamed that I had not, I later found a copy and set out to read it.

The present royal village is 11km away at Matsieng, set against another magnificent mountainside with waterfalls in the gulleys after the rains. After getting permission from a casual policeman and someone in the Royal Archives, we walked past the palaces: the modest house of Moshoeshoe II, king at independence in 1966; and the double-storey home of his son King Letsie II next door.

Both are beautiful but modest by the standards of politicians. Around them are the stone huts and rondavels of the royal village. One particularly pretty one caught our eye and we asked permission to photograph it: an old lady bent over a stick emerged to grant it. The policeman told us she was Me Moholobela, a relative of the late queen mother.

The whole place speaks of the respect and humility of the Basotho people, and as always it elicits the same in me towards them.

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Next day we headed on through the mountains to Semonkong in the valley of the Maletsunyane River, a place so remote when I was a child that you may as well have referred to Timbuktu.

The doctor flew there, now a tar road sweeps you through the most majestic - and today most wet - mountain scenery, roadsides splashed with gladioli and valleys thick with red-hot-pokers. Small villages of stone, mud and thatch still dot the hillsides and, after school, kids wash their clothes in the streams below.

Some houses casually boast the huge, beautiful spiral Aloe polyphylla, which only grow high in the Maluti. And yes, there are boys and men herding sheep and goats, but always leading cattle, dressed in Basotho blankets.

Jonathan and Armelle Halse own and run the Semonkong Lodge, yet another former trading station, tucked in a steep valley next to a low-water bridge on the river: local villagers come and go across it with laden animals all day.

Just after we arrive, the river floods over the bridge. As dusk falls, a huge colony of southern bald ibis circle to roost on the cliffs over the river.

The lodge offers myriad trekking, hiking, climbing, biking, fishing and other adventures, including the world's longest commercially operated abseil down the nearby falls.

The next day, guide Mokhophe Letuma drove us the short distance to the Maletsunyane Falls, at 186m the highest single-drop waterfall in Africa. We watched awe-struck from the viewpoint directly opposite, as it plunged down into the gorge. Mokhophe said he'd never seen it that full, but then he is a young man. We were the only people there.

"But where are all the tourists?" many of those who do come ask. I have no idea, but get there before them.

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Unsworth was a guest of:

• Sunflower tours; visit http://sunflowertours.co.za

• Living Life Station House; from R448 pp

• Roma Trading Post Lodge;  visit tradingpostlodge.com; from R300

• Malealea Lodge; visit malealea.com; from R195 pps in the backpackers' to R400 in rondavels and rooms. Meals extra

• Morija Guest House; visit morijaguesthouses.com; from R310 to R340 pps

• Semongkong Lodge; visit semonkonglodge.com; from R490 pps