MOYENI (Place of the Wind), also known as Quthing, is a curious split-level town established by the British after the Gun War in 1884. The town itself is messy, though it has an attractive setting beside a river gorge, with views of the surrounding hills improving as you climb to the upper part of town. This is home to the police station, the main hotel, a large hospital and one or two pretty useless banks, while the lower half has most of the shops and fuel stations and is where you catch public transport. During the day, there are always plenty of buses and minibus taxis running north towards Maseru, far fewer running east towards Qacha's Nek, and one or two heading for the nearby Tele Bridge border post (daily 8am-6pm), where you can pick up transport to Sterkspruit in the Eastern Cape.

 

The most easily accessible dinosaur footprints in Lesotho are very near the western side of the lower section of Moyeni. Just continue a short distance up the Main Road from the Moyeni turn and look out for the simple visitor centre (daily 8am-4pm), an orange thatched building beside the road on the left. The man who works there will direct you towards the variety of clearly discernible prints in the hope of a small tip.

Also worth a visit is the Masitise Cave House , a few kilometres west of Moyeni to the right of the main road. Follow signs to the Masitise primary and high schools, and at the high school ask for someone to show you the house, built into the cave by the French Protestant missionary family who lived here in the 1870s.

A little further on, are some much-vandalized and greatly faded rock paintings . If you've made it this far, have a brief look also at the pleasant mission church , which has a fine bell tower but no bell.