It was to be another peach day as Ntate Makhoabenyane saw me off after handing me a packet of winter peaches from his trees.

It was a beautiful, clear morning. The huge mountains circled the slope on which his homestead was situated. It felt as if the place was at the bottom of an enormous, deep bowl.

The highest of them, called Khatibe, loomed up towards to north.

The morning air was crisp and as luck would have it, my first few kilometres went downhill.

And they were steep down hills.

At the very bottom of this down hill stretch were a couple of stores where a few mini-bus taxis had stopped.

People were getting in and out of them. Then the vehicles turned around. It seemed that this little place, called Moteng, was as far as these vehicles would venture into the highlands because after Moteng there would be no more downhills. Not for a good 12 kilometres. It wasn’t the distance that mattered but rather the altitude.

And that involved going up to 2820 metres above sea level at the top of the Moteng Pass. The steep climb wasn’t the only excitement that awaited me.

Halfway up towards the first bend, using the method of pedalling gently in low gear, a man in traditional highland clothes called out to me.

He seemed a bit disabled on one side of his body and he did not speak in words, just grunts and other noises. I wondered if he had once suffered a nasty stroke.The man walked across the road, stood in front of me and reached deep into his pocket with his only hand that worked properly.

Out came a plastic bag, which he moved, with his hand, up to his mouth.

Then, using his teeth he bit the bag and sucked out something hard.When that hard thing landed in his hand I realised he was offering to sell me a diamond. Or something he was claiming to be a diamond. It was a square, glassy-looking thing.

I didn’t want to buy it, mainly because it’s illegal to do so and also because I had no need for a diamond. However, I wanted a photograph of it, which he allowed me to take.

There are diamonds up in these mountains and later in the trip I would come across the world’s highest diamond mine at Letseng-le-Terae but that was still many metres higher and many kilometres ahead.

Image: Duncan Guy, CC-BY-SA

WHAT DO YOU THINK? What do think makes diamonds so valuable?