"Cannibals?"
"Yes. Right here. In Lesotho."
Rantaoleng was smiling, enjoying his own story. After years as chief guide on Thaba Bosiu mountain fortress, he knows what it takes to keep visiting tourists interested.
We'd picked our way along a short, dusty track before clambering over knee-high boulders up toward the rocky gap known as Wepener's Pass. As far as mountains go, Thaba Bosiu, "the mountain at night", is an unimpressive 120-metre hillock in a country of towering spires. But its story is inextricably linked to a lofty figure in Lesotho history: Moshesh the Great - King Moshoeshoe I, father of the Sotho nation.
But cannibals? Evidently in July 1824, Morena Moshoeshoe, the son of a minor chief in the Bakoena tribe, led his followers away from the constant attacks by neighbouring tribes at Butha-Buthe to the safety of a mountain above the Caledon River valley. They trekked in haste, arriving in the dark at the site his half-brother, Mohale, had scouted. The men spent most of that first night fortifying the access points.
On the journey, a small group of the elderly and weary lagged behind and were killed. And eaten. Moshoeshoe's grandfather was among them.
I wasn't sure what was more worrying: that cannibals once lived in Lesotho, or why my school history books had conspired to ignore it.
Rantaoleng indulged my fascination. "When Moshoeshoe's warriors wanted to turn back for the cannibals who had eaten his grandfather, he said to them: 'Do not kill them, for they are the graves of my forefather.'
"Not only did he show the cannibals mercy, but Mzilikazi's Matabele too. After successfully defending the mountain from this ruthless impi, he sent a herd of fat oxen after them as they retreated," related Rantaoleng. "Was it arrogance or did he really think hunger had prompted the attack? We'll never know. But Mzilikazi never launched another offensive in the Caledon Valley."
The birthplace of a nation is a good site to start a tour of a country, but Lesotho's capital city is its most recent manifestation.
Maseru gets its name from the local sandstone from which it was first built, but if you're expecting a majestic old town, it's a letdown. The city of 350 000 sprawls east from the Caledon River (the border with South Africa) much like any other African city: Mercs and Discovery IIIs cruise potholed roads past roadside stalls hawking everything from "authentic" branded jeans and sneakers to apples and cooked mealies. Cellphone-wielding youngsters strut alongside blanket-wearing Sotho from the mountains. Suspended somewhere between raw capitalism and subsistence, it's a loud, vibey and exciting place.
With most of the important shops and buildings located along one central street called Kingsway, it's not a difficult city to navigate. But having a guide through the termite-nest traffic adds insights otherwise missed and there are few better than Mashapha "Shaps" Nkuebe. He's been in the tourism industry since the late 1970s when he helped set up the Lesotho Tourism Board.
Shaps isn't shy with his car hooter and has a knack for sneaking a gap between the myriad minibus taxis. He took me to the big Sotho hat building which houses the Lesotho Co-operative and Handicrafts Centre and the wool and mohair weavers on the outskirts of town. We also went to Lancers Gap, named after, but evidently never used by, the 12th Royal Lancers in the Gun War of 1880.
"We need your money and you need our water." In a damp tunnel, deep within the bowels of the 185-metre Katse Dam wall, a tour guide made the Lesotho Highlands Water Scheme sound like a simple plumbing job. Or the reasoning behind it, at least. But what a plumbing job!
It involved damming Lesotho's major rivers, most of which flow into the Senqu River (which becomes the Orange River) and diverting this water through tunnels and channels back against its flow via a hydro-electric plant to certain South African rivers. These, in turn, flow into the Vaal and eventually out of Gauteng's taps.
Even if engineering isn't your major interest, standing on top of (and inside) a structure built from nearly two-and-a-half million cubic metres of concrete is pretty spectacular.
Besides the breathtaking wall, the dam is a spectacle: deep, blue-green and mysteriously menacing. With cliffs rising all around, it's the closest thing you'll get to a Norwegian fjord in Africa.
On routes such as the Pitseng Pass to Katse, you realise why the locals still use ponies to go everywhere and ploughing with oxen remains the preferred farming method. Cars were not built for such a steep environment.
At the top of the pass is the 1 970-hectare Bokong Nature Reserve. From here, you can see views of the Lepaqoa River with a huge waterfall which freezes in winter.
Further to the north, on the dirt track from Butha-Buthe to the Malibamatsoe River, is the Ts'ehlanyane National Park, the country's newest and largest reserve, covering 5 600 hectares of mountain terrain, which encompasses the upper catchment of the Ts'ehlanyane River.
The Ha Kome cave village is also well worth a visit. Built into the crevice of a large overhanging rock near Sefikeng are neat dwellings first constructed in the 19th century. Descendants of the original inhabitants still live there, but a slight disappointment is that it's almost too well restored.
King Moshoeshoe has long since passed to the place of his ancestors and, thankfully, there aren't any cannibals left. But the spirit of goodwill born from the compassion he showed his enemies so long ago lives on in Lesotho today.
The greeting, "dumela" seems to echo through the valleys wherever you go. And go you must.
Although surrounded by South Africa, it has a wild "other country" feel. You could easily be somewhere in central Africa.
Lesotho's remote, high-lying villages still rely heavily on subsistence farming and basic bartering for survival. From this, a kind of "plastic-flag economy" has evolved: if someone slaughters a beast and has surplus meat to trade, they hang a red flag (usually a plastic packet) on a pole outside their hut. The same is done for veggies (green flag) and home-brewed beer (yellow flag if it has hops in or white if it's pure sorghum).