There's been heavy snowfall in Southern Africa ahead of the 2017 ski season.
Afriski in Lesotho (pictured above today) and Tiffindell in South Africa have both reported up to 30cm of natural snowfall in the past 36 hours.
Afriski, which is due to open in three weeks' time on June 8th, reports the access road in to the centre is currently closed.
The snow is great news for the two centres which in poor natural-snow years are heavily reliant on artificial snowmaking in order to operate.
Bothy centres are normally the first to open in the southern hemisphere, shortly before the earliest areas to open in Australia and New Zealand. However they also have a shorter season, usually closing in late August when South American, Australian and New Zealand ski areas stay open to at least mid-September and sometimes mid-October.
Although there are less than half a dozen ski areas, Africa is the only continent to have ski areas in both the northern and southern hemispheres, it also now has year-round skiing, indoors, at Ski Egypt, which opened in March near Cairo.