Almost nobody takes travellers into Lesotho. That is the reason to go.

Lesotho is a kingdom in the sky, the only country in the world whose lowest point is more than a thousand metres above the sea. It is ringed entirely by South Africa, crossed by very few roads, and known to most people, if at all, as the white space in the middle of the map.

I spent the better part of four years working there. I know it as a place I lived in, not a place I passed through, and the welcome in this journey comes from people I know rather than from anyone paid to give it.

Our sample departure runs from Friday 9 to Tuesday 20 April 2027. The group lands in Durban and spends a first night on the coast at Zimbali Lodge, where everyone can arrive in their own time. Then inland: two nights on safari in the malaria-free hills of Nambiti, two in the Drakensberg under the wall of the mountains, then up the Sani Pass into Lesotho for a night at the top, three in the northern valleys and two beside the falls at Semonkong.

Why April

April is autumn in the high country. The summer storms that build over the Drakensberg every afternoon have passed, the air is clear and dry, the days are still warm and the nights are cold enough for a fire. It is the settled window between the rains and the first winter snow, and the best time of year to be flying in these mountains.

It is also the end of the green season at Nambiti, when the grass is still long and the heat has gone out of the days. What the animals do is up to them.

Three more nights, at Phinda

For guests who want more time in the bush, Phinda is three nights further on, in the far north of Zululand between the Lebombo mountains and the Indian Ocean. The name means the return: thirty-odd years ago this was worn-out farmland, and it has been brought back into one of the finest private reserves in the country, with a dry sand forest found in very few places on earth and black rhino that can be tracked on foot.

From Maseru the group flies to Johannesburg, spends the night at the Westcliff, and flies on to Phinda's own airstrip the next morning. Three nights at Phinda Mountain Lodge, then back to Johannesburg for the evening flights home. Phinda is in a low-risk malaria area, the only part of the journey that is, and guests who add it should take advice from their own doctor.

The thinking

The group flies through the night, and not everyone will be on the same flight, or even arrive on the same day. The afternoon flight from Dubai lands in Durban at 16:35. Whenever they land, they are met at King Shaka International and brought to the same place, and the journey begins from there: a night on the coast at Zimbali Lodge, about twenty minutes north of the airport, where each guest can arrive in their own time, sleep, swim in the pool and meet the others at dinner.

Zimbali is a private estate in coastal forest above the Indian Ocean, gated and quiet. The lodge sits inside it, its rooms tucked under the trees with private decks, an infinity pool among the palms, a spa, and grounds that run down to the beach. We never go into Durban itself: the road from the airport runs north along the coast, and the road inland the next morning skirts round the city.

This day has one job: to get everyone rested, with nothing else asked of them until dinner. I meet every arrival myself.

The thinking

Nambiti is a private reserve in the hills near Ladysmith, in the country where the Anglo-Boer and Anglo-Zulu wars were fought. It has the Big Five and cheetah, open grassland, thornveld and the valley of the Sundays River, and it is free of malaria, which means nobody on this journey needs to take tablets unless they add the Phinda extension.

There is no early start. After breakfast the group leaves the coast and drives inland through the Midlands, about three hours, or flies at the top level in about forty-five minutes. Lunch is at the lodge, and the rangers go out at four.

A day in the bush has its own shape. Out before the sun, when the animals are moving; back in the heat, when they are not; out again in the late afternoon, and home in the dark. I have visited more than three hundred camps across Southern Africa. What I can arrange is the vehicles, the people on them and the time. What I cannot arrange is what is found, and I will not pretend otherwise.

More about Esiweni Luxury Safari Lodge, at the top and middle levels →
More about Nambiti Hills Private Game Lodge, at the entry level →

The kitchen at Esiweni

Esiweni is owned by a French couple, Ludovic Caron and Sophie Vaillant, and it keeps a French table. The chef is South African and trained in London, and the cooking joins Paris to what grows here, much of it from the lodge’s own garden.

Lunch is often taken down by the river, under umbrellas on the rocks, and dinner on the deck above the gorge or around the fire. Anyone with something they cannot eat need only tell us before they travel.

At the top and middle levels, this is where the group eats for two nights. The entry level stays at Nambiti Hills Private Game Lodge, in the same reserve, where the cooking is simpler.

The thinking

On a vehicle you look for animals. On foot you start to notice everything else: a track in the sand from the night before, the smell of a place where a buffalo has lain, the birds that tell you something is moving before you see it. We would arrange a walk with an armed ranger for anyone who wants one, and for anyone who wants to see the reserve from above, a balloon over the savannah at first light, if the wind allows. Everyone else takes the morning drive.

After breakfast the day belongs to each guest. There is yoga every morning at Esiweni for anyone who wants to join. From the lodge we would arrange fly-fishing, mountain biking across the reserve, riding, rafting on the river, the zip line in the Drakensberg, or a round of golf. And for anyone who wants to see the mountains from above before they walk in them, a helicopter flight up to the Drakensberg escarpment, which I would put first on the list. At the top level it is included, flown the next morning on the way to the Kamberg.

Forty minutes from the reserve is Spioenkop, where one of the bloodiest battles of the Anglo-Boer War was fought in January 1900. Winston Churchill was there as a young war correspondent, and Mohandas Gandhi as a stretcher-bearer. We would arrange for a historian to take anyone interested over the battlefield. The last night at Nambiti ends with dinner out under the sky, if the weather allows.

The thinking

Cleopatra Mountain Farmhouse sits on a trout dam in the Kamberg valley, right under the wall of the Drakensberg. Richard and Mouse Poynton built it around their kitchen, and it is one of the few places in the country people drive a long way to for dinner alone.

We stay two nights because there is more here than one afternoon allows: the walking trail up to the San paintings, the walk to the waterfall, the trout, the horses, and, an hour and a half away, the place where Nelson Mandela was arrested. Two nights also means the group sees the Drakensberg from below, properly, before seeing it from the top.

The first afternoon is kept gentle. After three early mornings in the bush, most people want a bath, a walk around the water and a sleep before dinner.

More about Cleopatra Mountain Farmhouse →

The kitchen

Dinner at Cleopatra is the reason the farmhouse is known. It runs to seven courses, cooked from what the farm, the garden and the valley have that week, and each course is brought to the table and explained. There is no menu to choose from. The kitchen decides, and it is almost always right.

Breakfast is its own event, and lunch is taken on the deck over the water or packed for the hills. Anyone with something they cannot eat need only tell us before they travel; the kitchen plans around it.

It is the best food on the journey, and we have placed it where it can be enjoyed: two evenings in a row, with nothing early the next morning.

The thinking

Up the valley from the farmhouse is Game Pass Shelter. The San painted this overhang for thousands of years, and one panel in it, of a dying eland with a figure holding its tail, did more than any other to show what the paintings were about. They are not records of hunting. They are records of what the painters saw in trance, in the world beyond this one. The walk is about three hours there and back, uphill all the way out, with a guide from the Kamberg rock art centre.

The afternoon is for choosing. A guide and a rod on the dams for anyone who fishes, or wants to learn. Horses in the foothills. The walk to the waterfall, for anyone who missed it the day before. Or, for anyone who wants it, an hour and a half’s drive to Howick, to the place where Nelson Mandela was arrested on 5 August 1962 and began twenty-seven years in prison. A sculpture of fifty steel columns stands there now, and from one spot on the path they come together into his face.

Then the second dinner, and an early night. Tomorrow the group goes up.

The thinking

There are easier ways into Lesotho, and almost everyone who goes uses them. Sani is the one road up the escarpment from this side: a track that leaves the farmland and climbs in tight switchbacks up the face of the Drakensberg to a border post at 2,874 metres. From below, Lesotho is a wall. From the top, it is a high, open plateau with shepherds in blankets and very little else.

Every level goes up the pass the same way, by 4x4, because this is how the kingdom should first be seen. The top level flies to the foot of it, and the others drive. The night is at Sani Mountain Escape, at the top of the pass, with fires in stone rondavels and the whole escarpment below the window.

It is a big step up in height from the valley, and some guests will feel it that evening as a headache or a poor night’s sleep. We keep the afternoon gentle and the evening early, and the next day takes everyone lower.

The thinking

From the top of Sani to our lodge in the north is a long way through the mountains. The top level flies it in about forty-five minutes, low over the Maloti, and spends the afternoon in the valley.

The other levels drive it, and it is not a lost day. The road runs through Mokhotlong and over passes higher than anywhere else a road goes in Southern Africa, past shepherds’ villages and one of the highest diamond mines in the world. It takes five to six hours with stops, and lunch is a picnic somewhere with a view.

The weather decides the flying in these mountains. If the cloud is down, the pilots will not go, and we would not want them to. On that day the top level drives with everyone else.

Three nights at Maliba

Maliba is where the journey slows down. Three nights, two of them with full days, in one valley, with more to do than anyone will manage and no need to do any of it.

From the lodge there are walks for every pair of legs: along the Hlotse River to Black Pool, up through the woodland to the waterfalls and the natural pools for a swim, or out onto the high mountain paths the Lesotho Ultra Trail follows. There are Basotho ponies and horses, archery, birding that is as good as anywhere in the country, a 4x4 drive up into the high country, the wildlife of the park, and the spa.

Two things we would arrange for everyone: an afternoon with the families I know in the villages nearby, and the dinosaur tracks in the sandstone. The rest each guest chooses for themselves, day by day, with the guide and the lodge.

The thinking

Maliba sits inside Tsehlanyane National Park, one of the very few places in Lesotho where the old woodland survives. The morning is for being in it, on foot or on a Basotho pony, the small, sure-footed horse bred for these mountains.

I spent the better part of four years working in Lesotho, and the families the group visits in the afternoon are people I know. This is not a village tour. Nobody performs and there is no craft stall at the end. It is a visit, arranged the way you would arrange to visit anyone: in advance, with something brought, and with time to sit down.

Before dinner, each guest is given a Basotho blanket. Every pattern means something, and the blanket is still worn every day in the highlands, by shepherds and by the king.

The thinking

After a week on the move, a slower day. The mountains of Lesotho are built on sandstone laid down about two hundred million years ago, and in places the tracks of the animals that crossed it are still there, pressed into the rock. A short drive from the lodge, a local guide shows the group where to look.

The afternoon belongs to each guest. From the lodge there is archery, some of the best birding in Lesotho, hikes up the valley to the waterfalls and the natural pools for a swim, a stretch of the high mountain paths the Lesotho Ultra Trail follows from the lodge, horses, a 4x4 drive up into the high country, or the spa. Or nothing at all: a long sleep at altitude is the one most people choose.

The Basotho sing. Churches, schools and villages across the country have choirs, and we would arrange for one to come to the lodge after dark and sing around the fire.

The thinking

In 1824 Moshoeshoe brought his people to the top of Thaba Bosiu, and from it he built the Basotho nation. Army after army came, and the mountain was never taken. He is buried on the summit, beside the kings who came after him. Across from it stands Qiloane, the small pointed hill whose shape gave the Basotho hat its form, the same hat that is on the national flag. We would arrange for a historian to walk the group up the old path.

Through the friendships I made over my years in Lesotho, we would arrange for the group to be received by a chief and to share a meal at his home. It is the kind of thing that cannot be bought, only asked for, and we will confirm it in writing before anything is printed.

Then south to Semonkong. The lodge there is simple rather than grand, and we would rather say so now. It is the only place to stay near the falls, and waking to the sound of the river is the reason to be there.

The thinking

The Maletsunyane River drops about 192 metres in a single fall into a gorge below Semonkong, the place of smoke, named for the spray that hangs over it. The morning begins on foot, walking out to the edge to stand in the sound of it.

This is the day the journey is built around, and every level has it. The helicopters come in late in the morning, fly the group down the gorge past the falls, and then up to a summit that the pilots and I will have chosen in advance: a peak with no road to it and no path up it. An earlier flight carries up the table, the linen and the champagne. So far as anyone knows, nobody has eaten a meal there before, and nobody will again, because each departure is given its own mountain.

Cloud can close a summit in minutes. We would hold a second, lower peak in reserve, and a table by the falls if the high ground is lost altogether. The one thing we will not do is fly into weather to keep a promise.

The thinking

The flight from Maseru leaves in the afternoon, so the last morning is not rushed: breakfast, then fly-fishing on the Maletsunyane with a guide or a 4x4 trip out along the gorge, lunch, and then down out of the mountains to the capital. For anyone with the nerve, there is also the abseil beside the falls, said to be the longest commercially run single-drop abseil in the world, which has to be booked well ahead.

The flight lands in Johannesburg at half past five, and the flight to Dubai leaves at twenty past ten. At the top and middle levels we would arrange day rooms at the airport hotel, so that nobody spends the evening in a terminal: a shower, dinner and a few hours to rest before the night flight. I say goodbye at Maseru airport, and in Johannesburg a meet-and-assist team takes the group from the aircraft to the hotel and on to check-in.

At the top level the group flies down to Maseru by helicopter after lunch, about twenty minutes, with the luggage gone ahead by road in the morning; at the middle level the same flight can be added. If the group would rather catch the earlier evening flight home, we would arrange a private plane from Maseru, which can leave whenever suits. And for anyone who would rather not fly the same night, a last night at the Four Seasons Westcliff in Johannesburg.

Some weeks after they are home, a parcel arrives: a printed book of the journey, which I write myself, illustrated with the group’s own photographs, with their names in it. Guests continuing to Phinda fly on from Johannesburg instead.