The Fingal #MapLesotho team left Ireland and Germany on Friday with Dave Corley and myself going through Dublin and Colin from Münster. We left amidst great good wishes from our friends in Action Ireland Trust, Fingal County Council and openstreetmap IRL. For a brief few moments our planes were racing for the coast of northern Africa as seen in Colin’s flight tracking tweet.

https://twitter.com/rusty1052/status/563841065338568707

We arrived in Maseru with a fond feeling of being welcomed. On the descent in the smallish Embraer RJ135 we had an opportunity to study the landscape for all the features that we regularly map, houses, buildings, rivers, roads, tracks etc. It is very interesting to see this from a different perspective, i.e. not the static satellite image - but the vantage point on a human scale and in real life, where we could see people driving around, animals in fields and the breeze waking up a beautiful and sunny Lesotho.

http://youtu.be/jkuMNbuyXHY

http://youtu.be/NnPyOuKfcYs

We soon made our way to the Pioneer Mall for some supplies, and then straight to the Avani Maseru Hotel where we checked in and recieved another warm welcome from our old friends in the hotel, including Moshoeshoe the barman who knew we needed something cold and thanked us for visiting Lesotho in doubtful times.

We have a lot of work ahead, so keep and eye on this blog for how we are proceeding with #MapLesotho