I’m back, after a rough overnight bus ride from Port Elizabeth squashed between the window and a very large woman with a voluminous blanket. Fortunately, that was the worst part of an otherwise delightful trip–much more relaxed than my last solo venture (view the full photo album here). And now, a quick recap, in two installments.

Part 1: The Drakensberg

These big rocks on the border with Lesotho–the tallest in Southern Africa–are the real reason I had to fly back across the country. I don’t even know why I felt so drawn to their craggy vastness, all fleeced in with clouds, but I couldn’t leave without going there. On the first day, I climbed up with a group of Australians, Britons, South Africans, Americans, and a German, huffing and puffing to the top of the second-highest waterfall in the world (it’s really nothing more than a stream cascading off the edge of a cliff). On the second day, a darling American couple–one working as a nurse in Swaziland, the other about to start on a doctorate in theology–took me and another girl to Royal Natal National Park, where we clambered up a gorge so stunning that the only way we could describe the views was by comparing them to movies, from Blood Diamond to Lord of the Rings. So yeah, no disappointment there.

The curious thing about visiting the Drakensberg, though, is that driving around the the different trailheads, you go through the sprawling communities of Kwa Kwa–a million-person settlement with huge unemployment problems. Tourism just doesn’t employ those kind of numbers. How many of them have ever made it to the top of the mountains they look up at every day, that draw thousands every year from around the world? How many of them will ever leave?