Roma Valley

Lia found Roma Valley on a map almost by accident — a small dot 35 kilometers southeast of Maseru, with a note about a university and something about footprints. We had rented a battered Toyota in the capital and figured half a day would do it. We stayed until sunset. The road climbs slowly out of the Maseru sprawl and the sandstone starts appearing in slabs and towers, the kind of rock that makes you slow the car down just to look at it. By the time we reached the valley floor, the light had gone that flat gold color it does in the highlands, and I remember thinking this felt less like a detour and more like the actual destination.

The National University of Lesotho sits right in the middle of the valley, and I hadn’t expected to care about a university campus, but this one has weight to it. Founded in 1945 as Pius XII Catholic University College, it’s the oldest tertiary institution in all of southern Africa, and you can feel that history in the older stone buildings even as students in university hoodies cut across the quad on their phones. We parked near the entrance and just walked for a while, no real plan, past classroom blocks and a church that predates most of what I’d call “modern Lesotho.” A groundskeeper told us, half-joking, that half the country’s civil servants had walked these same paths as students.

What actually pulled us out of the car for hours, though, was the rock. The sandstone outcrops around Roma preserve dinosaur footprints somewhere between 180 and 200 million years old, laid down in the early Jurassic long before this was highland savanna. A local guide walked us to a set pressed into a slab near a dry riverbed, and I crouched there for a long time, running a finger along a track a three-toed creature left before there was a Lesotho, before there was an Africa shaped like the one we know. A short walk further brought us to a sandstone shelter with San rock art — faded ochre figures, part of a much larger scatter of Bushman paintings across these highlands. Lia photographed them for twenty minutes straight; I mostly just stood there, feeling small in a good way.

We ate lunch at a small roadside spot near the university gates — papa and a stew I never got the name of, eaten off a plastic table while students argued about football at the next one over — and by the time we got back in the car the valley had gone quiet in that particular highland way, cold air settling in fast once the sun dropped behind the cliffs. Roma isn’t a place you rush. It rewards the kind of aimless wandering we accidentally did.

When to go: Aim for April to June or September to November — the shoulder seasons here spare you Lesotho’s brutal highland winter, when the cold at this altitude turns a pleasant walk into a genuinely uncomfortable one.