Sani Pass is a gravel ladder of hairpins climbing the Drakensberg escarpment from South Africa into Lesotho, gaining 900 metres in its last eight kilometres to a border post at 2,876 metres and the highest pub in Africa, and it is driven in four-wheel drives from Underberg, the only road up the wall of the mountains for a hundred kilometres in either direction. The cliffs the road climbs are lava flows stacked on top of each other, poured out when Gondwana began to tear apart 180 million years ago, and the pass was a mule track until 1948, when a trader cut the road for his trucks; the last eight kilometres are the pass itself, blind hairpins stacked on loose gravel, each opening a wider view back down the valley, with the wrecks of trucks that did not make it on the slopes, and the Lesotho border post at the top is a whitewashed hut with a flag on a pole standing alone on the plateau grass, where the passport is stamped into the Kingdom in the Sky. Sani Mountain Lodge keeps a wood fire burning at 2,874 metres and claims the title of the highest pub in Africa, with the escarpment dropping away outside the window.
The plateau is another country in every sense, a treeless grassland of herders in the blankets that are the national dress of Lesotho, each pattern telling where its wearer stands in life, riding ponies between stone villages. Warm air rising off the lowlands hits the escarpment by early afternoon, cools and condenses, and cloud spills over the edge and fills the valley below, so the drive is done in the morning; the pass is the one place with easy road access to the Drakensberg rockjumper, siskin and mountain pipit, three birds that live nowhere but this escarpment, and the bearded vulture, which lives almost entirely on bone, sails along the cliffs. From December the alpine grassland flowers, best in January and February. Sani Pass is a road up a wall of old lava, and the pub at the top is in another country.