Sani Pass with a borrowed Fortuner

The road isn’t the problem. The rental agreement is.

The Sani Pass — the mountain road that connects the KwaZulu-Natal foothills of the Drakensberg with the Lesotho plateau at 2,874 metres above sea level — is, on a dry March day, not actually that difficult. The road is nine kilometres of graded dirt and loose rock with gradients that reach thirty percent in sections and require four-wheel drive engaged from the South African border post to the summit. The surface is maintained by the Lesotho government, which maintains it in the manner of a government that has limited earthmoving equipment and considerable mountain to maintain. It is rough, it is steep, and it periodically erodes after rain.

What most visitors encounter as the primary complication of the Sani Pass is not the road. It is their car rental agreement. Standard South African hire cars prohibit crossing into Lesotho without advance authorisation — some companies charge ZAR 1,000 to 1,500 for a cross-border permit per frontier. Most rental contracts also prohibit driving on unpaved roads, which makes the Sani Pass doubly problematic for anyone in a conventional hire car. The fine print matters enormously here.

We drove in a Toyota Fortuner borrowed from friends who live in Underberg, the small town at the base of the pass. The Fortuner is a mid-size SUV on a truck platform, with a manually selectable four-wheel drive transfer case. It is overkill for the Sani Pass on a good day and exactly appropriate on a bad one. We went up in early March, which is technically autumn in the southern hemisphere and which means the Drakensberg is in its post-summer wet season: the grass on the high slopes was green and the peaks were lost in cloud from midday.

The South African side: Himeville to the first border post

The approach from Underberg through Himeville to the Sani Pass border post is a fifty-kilometre drive on a mix of tarred and gravel road. The tarred section runs to about twenty kilometres before Himeville; the rest is well-maintained gravel through farmland and smallholding. The South African border post is at the base of the climb, at approximately 1,550 metres elevation. Procedures take five to fifteen minutes depending on the queue.

Between the South African post and the Lesotho post at the summit, there is no telephone signal, no petrol, no emergency services reachable within an hour, and a road that is one vehicle wide in most sections with passing points at irregular intervals. If you have a mechanical problem on the Sani Pass proper, you wait until another vehicle comes down or up and negotiates assistance.

The climb: what it actually requires

Engage four-wheel drive low range before the first major hairpin. The gradient increases substantially in the middle section. We counted nine major hairpins; guidebooks say between seven and eight, which suggests the counting depends on what qualifies as a full hairpin versus a severe bend. Some sections are narrow enough that a vehicle coming the other way requires one party to reverse to a passing point, which on a thirty-percent gradient in loose rock is an exercise in nerve.

The most challenging point — about two-thirds of the way up — is a series of stepped rock shelves where the track has eroded to exposed stone. The Fortuner crossed them easily. A sedan would have its undercarriage on the rock.

We saw two vehicles on the climb. Both were going down — day trippers who had made the summit and were returning to KZN. One was a Land Cruiser 200 with Gauteng plates. One was a Hilux with a Lesotho plate, moving fast in a way that suggested familiarity with the route that we did not have. We pulled over at a wide point. The Hilux went past with about thirty centimetres to spare.

The summit: Sani Top and the pub

The Lesotho border post at the summit processes paperwork in approximately the same time as the South African post. The Sani Mountain Lodge — a combination of thatched chalets, a restaurant, and the famous Sani Top pub, which bills itself as the highest pub in Africa (2,874m) — is five minutes from the border post.

In early March, we were the only guests at the lodge for lunch. A fire was burning in the hearth of the pub — the altitude makes early March genuinely cold, probably six or seven degrees with wind chill — and the beer was Maluti, the Lesotho national lager. The view from the terrace, on the days when cloud does not close everything, is directly down the pass to the KwaZulu-Natal midlands several thousand metres below.

The lodge runs guided walks onto the plateau from the summit. We spent two hours walking in the direction of the Semonkong road — the Lesotho plateau is an open, rolling highland landscape of basalt grassland, Basotho village compounds, and a silence that is distinct from any other silence in southern Africa because it has altitude in it.

If you don’t want to drive yourself

The alternative to the self-drive is a guided 4x4 trip from Underberg or Durban, which puts someone else in control of the vehicle and the navigation. Guided Sani Pass day trips from Underberg are well-run and include the border formalities, lunch at Sani Top, and some time on the plateau. The disadvantage is the group format and the fixed timing. The advantage is not having to think about the road.

Sani Pass day trips from Durban involve a longer transfer (two to two-and-a-half hours each way) but allow visitors staying in Durban or along the KZN coast to make the trip without relocation.

What this trip delivered

The Sani Pass is worth the effort specifically because it deposits you in a country and a landscape that looks like nothing else in southern Africa. The Lesotho plateau in late summer is high, green, cold, and inhabited by a population that lives in conditions of genuine isolation from the infrastructure of the surrounding lowlands. The ponies that carry people between villages here are Basotho ponies, a specific breed developed for the altitude and the terrain, and they are everywhere on the plateau road: a man and a boy on two ponies crossing a ridge above the Sani Top lodge, moving at walking pace, entirely unhurried, the horizon behind them at six thousand feet.