Hitching North

Chris had claimed that he was a magnet for good luck. I defended the belief that I too had attracted a lot of good luck on this trip. What I learnt within the first hour of travelling with Chris, was that when we took his good luck and added it to my good luck, we would have a phenomenal amount of good luck.

The plans we had made to get out of Windhoek were as complex as ‘find main road, stand on side of road with hand out, get ride going north’. We thought if we made it the 250km  to Otjuwarongo we would be doing alright, though we dreamed of making it as far as Outjo, an extra 100km north of that. Namibia is one of the least densely populated countries in the world, and it was not yet tourist season (though tourists are renowned for ignoring hitch-hikers anyway) so we were realistic enough to be prepared to spend most of the day, and the next few days after that, standing on cramped legs in the sweltering sun in the exact same spot, probably feeling defeated.

My walking shoes had been stolen the day before and my back pack and I had just one thing in common – we were both steadily gaining a couple of kilos each week. This had only become a problem because the main highway north was 5km away, and it was already over 30 degrees.  Before we had even reached the 1km mark of our 5km walk, Chris decided he needed to stop at a petrol station to buy a soft drink. I waited outside only to be approached by a young white guy who asked where I was headed. I pointed out Chris and told him we were heading north and he said that he can drive us as far as Outjo.

I was dumb-founded! We barely had to do any work to get this lift and he wanted to drop us exactly where we had dreamed of getting to!

I wondered, was it Chris’s luck for having to stop right then and there to get a drink, or my luck for standing in the right spot outside and having an angelic (or just sweaty and tired) enough look to attract a sympathetic offer? I did also wonder if it weren’t too good to be true… was he going to beat and enslave us and make us work at gun-point in Namibia’s infamous diamond mines?

Our driver’s name was Daniel, and before we could hit the highway he had to make a few stops. One of the stops was at his large three story house where we sat on the veranda drinking tea while he showed us his Nazi magazines and books from pre WWII, now illegal in Germany, but a collector’s item. He bragged about his gun collection. His pregnant wife was in her room and would occasionally yell out to him, to attend to her for some reason or other – we never actually saw her.

We also stopped at his business which was in the process of being closed down and cleaned out. It was a computer/game place in the shopping mall which, as he explained, was designed to give local kids something to do other than drugs and trouble-making. Apparently a party there one day got out of control and so the mall closed him down, Daniel said that whilst he was trying to do right by the community, the owners of the mall did nothing but screw him over. Daniel had lots of stories like that – about him trying to save people with his grand ideas while big businesses and the people kept screwing him over.

He told us how he had approached car manufacturers in Germany because he had designed a car that ran on air pressure. He had also approached the Namibian government because he had figured out a way to power the entire country by burning wood chips (not that that sounded at all sustainable to me) and apparently he had also had meetings with the big banks… he had single-handedly figured out a way to solve the countries economic problems.

However no one wanted to buy his inventions or implement his strategies… “the whole country is run by idiots” he tells us. I’m sure he was right about that at least – most countries are run by idiots, but I was starting to worry about Daniel, and the fact that I was sitting in the front seat beside him and had to hear these stories for the next 4 hours or more, while Chris sat in the backseat pretending to sleep.

He also talked about Namibia. He is from Germany but moved to Namibia when he was 18 (ten years ago), his parents own a safari lodge in Outjo, though they still live in Germany so they hired full time staff to take care of it. He said Namibia is the place to go if you need to “disappear off the grid”, he said there a lot of white people here in exile from other countries, and they’re either running away or fresh out of prison. He told us about his friend that worked for the German intelligence, that he let it slip  that the German government knew 9/11 was going to happen before the disaster occurred, and now both the US and German government were after him so he’s hiding in Namibia.

He talked about the staff on his fathers lodge. The managers are white Germans and the rest of the staff are black locals. When his father took over the lodge he built the staff proper houses for them and their families to live. He said they get paid very little, but they get given their food and health insurance and that if they didn’t do that “they would drink all their pay away and their families would starve”. It is hard to know what is blatantly ignorant racism and what is the unfortunate and ugly truth.

We stopped at a small village along the way so Daniel could visit one of his friends. The village reminded me of those in Ghana. People loitering (read: beer drinking) out the front of small tin shacks, children running barefoot, chickens pecking at the feet of jittery goats, music blaring, people trying to pull us over to talk, and sleazy men asking me for my contact details and giving me that hand shake eluding to sex: when they wiggle the tip of their index finger against the palm of your hand – that always grosses me out!

The friends in the village Daniel had stopped to see were in the middle of building their house. A house made of brick, with two bedrooms, a kitchen and separate lounge room and a fenced off garden. A house that once finished will bring them a sense of prestige and will no doubt be the envy of the village. Some of what Africans have adopted from their colonisers is outlandish. Traditionally, African’s have congregated outdoors; they eat, bathe, socialize and dance outside on the streets, it isn’t like Europe where the weather is so intimidating you need to stay inside. It is yet another commodity introduced by whites that is bigger and ‘better’ and reeks of false displays of superiority and yet now, here in this little Namibian village of tin shacks, stands one big oddball house, which its proud owners obviously feel they need… But then again, maybe they do? Who am I to make judgements on what people in Africa do and don’t need?!

Daniel drove his Alfa Romeo at 180km/hr (60km above the legal speed limit) and talked non-stop. We got to Outjo and he kept driving. He seemed to assume, without asking, that we would stay at his parent’s safari lodge.

We arrived at Sophienhof Lodge… and it was beautiful But it looked expensive.

Chris was the first to ask how much it costs. A dorm room was usually 200 Namibian dollars ($20 AUD) a night – that was twice our budget. Daniel shrugged and said he didn’t mind, he would make it cheap for us.

He then asked if we wanted to go on a private game drive. Duh! Yeah!

One of the staff joined us and we headed off in an open safari car in search of animals – it was nearly sun-down and nearly feeding time.

We got out to feed the ostriches pellets. They strutted up to us (at a speed over 50km an hour!) and snapped them right out of our hands with their strong, sharp looking beaks. Every time one made a sudden movement I shrieked like a little girl.

The next stop was to feed the cheetahs. They were rescued cheetahs but caged none the less and although it was poignant spending those sunset hours up close to three beautiful cheetahs, it was sad to see them captive, regardless of how big the cage was (it was big enough to not be able to see the surrounding electric fences).

On the safari drive we saw warthogs, zebra, wildebeest, springbok and the majestic kudu.

After the drive I was starving and wondered how we’d go about finding food. We seemed to be the only guests at the lodge except for a family of campers that had their own supplies and cooking equipment. I wondered if it would be rude to ask Daniel to drive us in to town.

But Daniel led us to the outdoor dining room, and shortly after the manager appeared with zebra and lamb steaks, rice, salad and of course beer. Chris and I devoured our meal, as well as seconds, and we continued to listen to Daniel’s stories. All around us was pitch blackness and the eerie sounds of unfamiliar bush lands.

In the morning we woke to be greeted by breakfast – eggs, cold meats and toast, tea, coffee and juice. We were living the life! Chris and I were feeling giddy – high on the realisation of our luck. Daniel invited us to stay another night and of course we could not decline.

Sophienhof Lodge had beautiful green manicured lawns and a swimming pool. Daniel showed us the entire property including the managers hut built in 1904, with walls covered in the heads of prized animals. At sunset we sat in relative quiet rocking in chairs on the veranda of the ‘honeymoon cabin’ which overlooked the distant mountain ranges.

We were served dinner again that night and again the next day we woke to breakfast.

I told Chris that it was my dream to own and live and work on a lodge similar to this. In the Australian bush though, where I would grow my own food and rent out holiday cabins nestled alone in the corners of the property. For those two days at Sophienhof Lodge I felt like I was living in my dream.

Daniel only charged us 200 Namibian dollars each for both nights – that included all the food and game drives and he did get us this far north as well. Daniel may be a bit of a tool, but he is a generous guy that’s for sure. And he showed us a hell of a good time.

Daniel dropped us into town and I had to get cream for some spider bites which were irritating as hell (probably should have mentioned those in an earlier blog, as they stuck around for days) and we wanted to buy Daniel a thank you present. Part of his present was some biltong. Biltong is dried, salty meat that is hugely popular in Southern Africa and Daniel loved the stuff. I got to the butchers right before it was about to close but the owner (white) invited me in anyway and we had a lovely chat. As I was leaving a black woman came in and the owner, no longer so friendly, abruptly told her he was closed.

I stood there awkwardly stunned and uncomfortable. Was I really the absolute last customer or would he have let her in anyway if she was white? It was a situation where I couldn’t be sure. Maybe he had already done a favour and let me in and that was where he drew the line and I was just being super sensitive and paranoid… or maybe I was let in because I was white.

I didn’t know what to say and she left before I said a single word.

Shoe-less

The next morning I woke up after 13 hours sleep! I can’t be sure if I was just catching up from all the sleepless nights beside snoring Alex (including one especially sleepless, especially uncomfortable, night in the car trying to get away from his snoring!), or if I just slept so much because I had nothing else to do.

After jumping out and leaving the boys behind I  paid a ridiculously large amount of money for a single bed with a sagging mattress in a dorm that I had all to myself, in a hostel that had no other guests and a restaurant that was permanently closed, in a town that had nothing but a queue to get dole payments and a lot of beggars that didn’t look particularly nice. At least I was free again to make my own decisions.

It poured down with rain that night so I couldn’t walk the streets like I usually do to kill time. I’d had two beers so I couldn’t read, there was no communal room with a television in the hotel and no other guests to talk to. So at 6pm I had nothing else to do but go to sleep.

Right before I was about to hit the sack there was a knock at the door. The lady at reception was worried about me. She wanted to know why I was travelling alone, where I was going next and whether or not my husband and children were worried for me. She couldn’t believe I survived Ghana, but that disbelief was overshadowed by the mere fact that I would go anywhere alone. There was no way she was letting me hitch to Windhoek the next day, so she called a bus-driving friend of hers to collect me in the morning and take me there.

In the morning I sat alone in the foyer eating a mini bowl of cornflakes while I waited for my bus to arrive. I was dead-certain that the man working there was gay. He was excited that I came from Australia – McLeod’s Daughters was his favourite TV show, and his dream was to work on a cruise ship boat and travel the world…. I hopethat one day he gets that job – everyone deserves a dream.

He asked me if I liked Namibia, I told him the landscape was stunning but that I found Namibians hard to talk to. He told me that Namibians were shy people and generally afraid of foreigners…. White foreigners.

As if to prove his point a delivery man showed up two minutes later and thought I worked there. I told him I didn’t but pointed to the door that lead to reception. He kept apologising profusely, keeping his eyes down at all times. Then he couldn’t open the door to reception so I got up and opened it for him. He practically bowed in half, kept his eyes down and continued to apologise incessantly.

It felt good to be back on local transport again, all over Africa the mini buses are much the same. First you sit in the one spot waiting for the bus to fill its seats before it can depart. It finally fills up and you think ‘great it’s going to leave now!’, but it never does. It sits there and waits until more and more bodies pile on and cram into spaces where there is no space. Like a game of Tetris people bend and fold around each other, squeezing there boxes and baskets onto other peoples laps and under butts, until there is not enough air to share and the bus finally takes off.

After sitting at the bus stop for an hour or more they always drive for only five minutes before stopping for petrol. They roll one side of the car up on to a pile of bricks and a group of men bounce on the side of the car trying to fit every last drop of petrol in the tank while the tightly folded passengers with no air start to feel nauseous from all the bouncing.

The heat inside swells and bodies steam a pungent odour while bad American pop- music blares from the speakers and all the passengers stare at the only white person on the bus…. I had missed this!

In case you were wondering which bad American music was playing, one song which played 7 times on that trip went like this:

“Can I be your number one man killer? Of course you can be my number one man killer!”

And that line was repeated over and over and over and over and over and over and over….

At Windhoek I checked into the backpackers that offered free internet. But first I had to make sure Alex and Michael were not booked in there too. The lady at the desk scanned her book and assured me that they were not.

When I went to bed that night guess who crawled into the bunks beside me? … Alex and Michael!

 I cursed the universe for trying to teach me a lesson the hard way. But I decided to take on that lesson and apologise to Michael and assure Alex that he was not the reason I jumped ship.

I told the staff I was checking out, and after breakfast I went to grab my bags. The whole room had been cleaned, my backpack was sitting there waiting for me but my shoes were gone. I only had one pair of shoes, they were my brand new Solomon hiking boots and I had left them at the foot of my bed but now they were gone.

I asked the woman at reception if she knew where my shoes were. She allowed me to search all the cupboards in the place but I couldn’t find my shoes anywhere. I asked her if the person who cleaned my room was still there so that I could ask if my shoes were at least spotted, then I may know if it was another guest or the cleaner who took them. She said that no, the cleaning lady had already left for the day and wouldn’t be back until 7am the next day. I asked if she could call the cleaner to ask if she had seen my shoes. She said that no, the cleaner does not have a phone.

I left a little frazzled and checked in to another hostel – a cleaner, quieter hostel with no Michael in it. The next morning I got up and walked back to the hostel to find my shoes. The same receptionist was quite surprised to see me there, I think she thought I had not just been checking out of the hostel, but checking out of Windhoek too.

Of course she still hadn’t seen my shoes.

“Well what about the cleaning lady, she is here today, may I ask her?”

“No, she is on holiday for a week”

“But yesterday you told me she was back today”

“No I didn’t”

“Yes you did”

“NO she is away…. But I called her last night and she said she did not see your shoes”

“But last night you said she doesn’t have a phone!”

“No… the other cleaner doesn’t have a phone, the one on yesterday does”

“WHAT?! When was another cleaner mentioned? That doesn’t make sense….”

A hostile stare from the receptionist and I knew I would never see my shoes again.

I couldn’t afford new shoes at this stage of my trip, so I knew that I would have to wear thongs for the last 6 weeks of the trip. It also meant I couldn’t hike the Simiens in Ethiopia. But it was the first thing to go missing in the 2 months I had already been travelling, and at least it wasn’t my passport or camera.

As I was walking back to my new hostel, from my old hostel I hear footsteps running up behind me. A young woman, I’ll guess 20 years old, catches up to me and when I turn she gasps “oh! I thought you were a man!” She takes my hand in hers. I HATE holding hands with strangers! But I was too polite to pull away so we walked awkwardly down the street hand in hand.

I keep my eyes fixed to the ground in front of me. She keeps her eyes fixed on me. So much so that she nearly trips twice.

She asks where my boyfriend is.

She tells me she is on her way to KFC, that her boyfriend is meeting her there in half an hour to buy her chicken, but that she is hungry now and can’t wait for him. I tell her I don’t have any money. We get to KFC and I try to pull my hand free and say goodbye, but she clasps it tighter. She insists on walking me to my hotel. I politely decline the offer. She squeezes my hand so tight that I can feel it turning purple.

With an aggressive jerk of my arm and twist of my hand I pull free. She steps even closer and I grab her shoulder and hold her at a distance – not roughly, but strongly. She glares at me and I have no doubt now that it is a stand-off. She was definitely threatening me but I stood my ground.  She tried to grab me and I squeezed her shoulder harder. She winced and I knew that I was stronger than her. I stared in to her eyes, firmly said goodbye and walked away… She didn’t follow me.

I had been having second thoughts about hitching north with Chris. My experience with Michael and Alex had turned me off travelling with strangers. I was craving something more rustic, something more challenging… I was ready to head north-east to Ethiopia.

When Chris arrived that night, exhausted from hitching up from the south, I changed my mind again. Firstly because he had changed all of his plans to come and meet me, but secondly because I was reminded of his gentle nature and zest for life.

He shared inspiring experiences and retold touching encounters with the people who’d driven him this far.

I thought ‘this could be good…. This could be great! Hitching north, into the unknown, looking for tribes I have only vaguely heard about… this sort of adventure was what I went to Africa to do after all’.

I was starting to feel the niggly effects of travelling. The exhaustion had just started creeping in and thoughts of home were close to becoming a craving for home. But I told myself that I had to push on. Keep going. Keep exploring. Don’t give up yet.

Sand Dune 7

I finally made it to the 390 metre pinnacle of Sand Dune 7 – the world’s highest sand dune.

We had raced there early in the morning, as soon as the gates had opened. Sand Dune 7 was pretty much my entire reason for visiting Namibia. As I sat there, deliberately a few spaces away from the boys, I watched the morning sun creep out from behind the cinematic majesty that spread out before me. Right then my whole world was nothing but a rolling sea of sand and a vast, cloudless blue sky. It was totally unlike anything else I have seen; perhaps it was not like anything else in this world.

This was day 5 of my 4x4 trip with the boys. Dreaming of that moment when I would be sitting on top of that dune was the only thing that got me through my time with them. Actually, it wasn’t all bad, and now, in hind-sight I look back fondly of my time with them and think to myself “they weren’t all that bad really”. But by day 5 my fuse had really shortened, and day 5 was only two days before that fuse finally blew.

There was one good afternoon in particular, day 4 I think, I had felt that I was in paradise. We had been winding through deep valleys, passed rocky hills, glimpsing kudu’s, zebra’s, springbok and Ostrich’s. We followed long stretches of road that led to soft-focus horizons blurred by sandy breezes and the sort of dry heat that makes the rumpled hills seem to quiver. We needed to stop driving, to rest, to get out a book or a pack of cards and more cold beer of course. We spotted a thin river down one of the deep escarpments that cut the earths crust. Michael cranked the car into 4x4 and hesitantly we crept down toward it.

Many times I felt the car tilting so much I was sure I would soon enough be looking at the world upside down. But he did it, he kept us upright and he got us there. We set up the tents and played a bit of frisbee. The boys wanted to climb to the top of the cliff to watch the sunset, I wanted some time in nature alone. While they set off on their climb I stripped down and got in touch with nature. The water was shallow, but it was cool and fresh and I felt the tingles of goose bumps spread across my sweaty, sticky skin as I floated on the surface, watching the stain of orange seep through the clouds and the shadows of dusk sweep down from the cliff and across my cooling body. I thought I had found heaven!

That night, completely alone at the basin of a thinly carved gully we drank wine and played cards and laughed until our eyes were heavy and our arms too tired to swat away the swarms of mosquitoes.

Magical moments like that one far out-weighed the frustrations, but I think I let all the little tiffs and the little comments get the better of me. The fact that Alex’s full-mouthed snoring kept me from any form of deep sleep the entire 7 days I travelled with them didn’t help my patience levels.

The fact that Michael kept comparing everything we saw to America and pointed out every woman we passed and made comments like “hot body, too bad about the face” got a bit tedious after a while. But what really creamed the cake was his passing comment one morning about poor service from wait-staff: “They are so stupid, no wonder they are third-world”.

One afternoon I stormed off during a conversation with Michael and Alex:

Alex: Around gay people I feel unsafe

Me: That’s ironic considering it is gay people that get bashed by straight people

Michael: No, no I agree. One night I went drinking with my sister’s gay friends and they slipped a roofy in my drink and when I woke up a guy was sucking my dick so I kicked him in the face and smashed his car

Me: Welcome to a woman’s world!

And I stormed off without making any of the points I wanted to and should have.

At sunset we didn’t go back to Sand Dune 7 because we anticipated too many tourists. We took our beers with us and climbed one of its neighbours which looked of equal size, but this one we had all to ourselves. In my diary I struggled to describe the dunes, the immeasurable space around us, the feeling of sedative emptiness. I tried to describe the dunes as creamy folds of caramel soft-serve ice-cream, or likes sheets of silk. They were topped with brush strokes of pistachio green where grasses clung on to life. I guess that inability to accurately express beauty is why I don’t consider myself a writer, but then again, how can you paint something so illustrious and so unreal it steals your breath away? I kept hearing the opening song of The Lion King play in my head and I thought “this is what I had hoped to find in Africa – the big empty spaces I had imagined were Africa”

We did make it to the ghost town. It was worth seeing, not just because it was a little creepy, but mainly because it led us to meet Chris.

Chris was from Germany and only 9 weeks in to his 3 year hitch-hike across the world. I instantly liked Chris from the second he tore into the backpackers room in a sweaty fluster after a long day squatting in the heat on the side of the road begging for a ride. He joined us for a seafood, seaside dinner on the first night and then for a dust-blown wander around Kolmanskop: the long abandoned colonial mining town where the wind howls and sand swells into piles in the shells of houses, a hospital, a school and a bowling alley. I think we were all grateful for Chris – another dynamic to our tired and taxed trio.

Chris seemed to like me too, and we arranged to meet in Windhoek in 3 days time. I had told him that I wanted to travel north, to see the tribes. I didn’t know where they were exactly, who they were exactly or how to get there exactly. But he nominated himself to help me find them.

I made it to the second last day of the time planned in the 4x4 with the boys before my fuse finally blew.

Michael and I had a huge fight. We both said some pretty nasty stuff and I fought back tears. I jumped out of the car and never looked back.

The Tow-Truck Incident

The boys decided we should head North up the Skeleton Coast. I didn’t really care, I was mainly there to see the sand dunes, and maybe even the ghost town (only cause the Fish River Canyon, the second largest canyon in the world, was closed). I was happy to be getting out of Swakopmund early, or as Alex would call it, Swakapoomp – it made me giggle every time.

On the way up the coast we passed a ship wreck which was kind of cool, and haggled with some guys over colourful rocks they were trying to sell. The guys selling them lived under little shade cloths on the beach just waiting for tourists like us to come along and buy their meager rocks. I was excited about one green one though:

“Put this rock in a fire and a rainbow will spread out of it” the man had told me.

“How long does it last?” I asked.

“For ever! It is a rock, it never burns out”

I bought it from him, and even at the time I knew I paid too much for it. It started a fight amongst his friends; they all said that he stole their business and they saw me first and that I have to buy rocks from all of them. The circle of men gathered in closer and closer around me. They got pushier and pushier. I was glad I wasn’t there alone and that the two boys were with me in a get-away car.

I later tried that rainbow-rock in a fire. For a few seconds it did nothing, then snap! Snap! Snap! the thing sparked and shot little flecks of fire out every angle. The thing fizzled and disintegrated into nothing. What a jip!

We turned off into Cape Cross seal reserve, you could smell it on the breeze kilometres before we could see it. Tens of thousands of barking, scratching, wriggling, fowl smelling seals all around us! It was very cool! It was not so cool seeing the dead carcasses of seals rotting amongst them, it was not so cool seeing the plastic and the string caught around some of the baby seals necks from crappy humans polluting the water with our trash, but it was cool staring into the wide owl-like eyes of a baby pup. I even petted one. Probably shouldn’t have, but did, and that was cool too.

We stopped at a random tin-shed bar in the middle of nowhere and a meerkat crept up to my ankles. When I picked it up it didn’t even squirm. The boys and I were getting along well, and I hoped that was the end of our teething problems. We stopped at a sea-side town and had the best fish meal I have ever eaten (wasn’t so bad to be forced to eat meat afterall)!

Heading back down south in the afternoon we passed some un-touched sand dunes. We decided it wouldn’t hurt to do some off road driving, we did have a 4x4 after all, and how amazing would it be to watch the sunset from atop of a terracotta sand dune with not another human in sight!

We were only a few hundred meters from the closest and largest dune when the car skidded and the tyres span at full speed but the car did not go forward at all, in fact, it started to sink.

We all got out and tried to push it out, then we pulled the shovels from the back and tried to dig it out. I pulled the foot matts from the car and wedged them under to give it some extra traction… it didn’t work, it just burnt skid marks into them which I hoped wouldn’t cost us more later. Nothing worked. The car sank lower and lower into the burning orange sand.

“Well” I shrugged. “We may as well take a few cold beers up to the top of that sand dune there and watch the sunset as planned. At least then we wouldn’t have gone through all this for no reason”. But Alex was stressed out, and my suggestion to just leave the car sinking in the sand while we drink beer and stare at the sky seemed to stress him out more (a cultural difference between a Frenchy and an Aussie perhaps?)

I called a tow truck company who said it would take a couple of hours to get there from the nearest town… not that I really knew where we were and I wondered how much delay would be caused from my shotty directions. I grabbed the beers and Michael and I left Alex down at the car and hit the top of the dunes.

It really was magic.

Not a car, not a building, not a blinking light in sight. Not even another sound except the sand crunching beneath our bare feet.

The sun had well and truly set by the time the tow truck arrived. We had watched their high beams scouring the empty desert for us. Without a single obstruction the lights seemed only minutes away when we first glimpsed them, but it took a good hour or more for them to spot us. I was almost disappointed that they had come. It was the perfect spot to set up camp for the night, waking up to the sand dunes at our door.

It turned out Alex hadn’t put the car in 4WD and that is why we had gotten stuck. The boys agreed it was a perfect camping spot so we planned to go in to the next town, buy some food and come back to where we were, in 4WD this time, and spend the night there.

Sounded like a plan set in stone except when we got to the town Michael decided he would rather eat at a restaurant and go to a bar to pick up chicks, but he was outnumbered. At the super market Alex raced around ahead of us filling the basket with cheap and crappy carbs and sugar – biscuits, chips, chocolate and 2-minute pastas. Michael and I definitely prefer to eat healthier than that, but I refused to fight about it. When Alex had filled the basket with crap he stood near the check-outs and waited impatiently. Meanwhile Michael was still in the first aisle, empty handed, deliberating over two different types of pesto. I went to see if I could help Michael, really just to speed things up a bit. He started whining that Alex is ruining ‘his and my’ trip. He said he can’t travel with him and he wants out. He wanted us to give him his money back so that he could travel alone. Quite frankly I would have been ok with him leaving, but I was not ok with giving him his money back. I talked to Alex and he said the same. I told Michael to give it another night, another go. He reluctantly said yes.

We went back to our bog-spot at the foot of the dunes in the middle of no-where and cooked our pasta dinner. Alex and I set up the tent we were sharing on the roof of the car. Michael was being difficult and insisted that he wanted to set up his little tent on the desert sand. “You’re crazy!” I told him, knowing he was just deliberately trying to be difficult. “You don’t know what is living out there in the desert – wild dogs… hyena’s…” He was a stubborn guy and not willing to lose a fight, so he chose a spot a few meters from the car to set up his little tent.

We sat on the back of the car and ate our nutrient deficient dinner and drank some more beer. “What is that!” cried Alex. We all had our head-torches on and swung them in the direction of his. Two glinting little eyes sparkled out of the darkness. We scanned the dark with out lights and saw another four sets of twinkling eyes. They had formed a circle around the car and silently watched us.

Michael changed his mind and set up the tent on the roof beside us.

In the middle of the night I woke up to the sound of howling. I needed to pee. Alex was snoring loudly beside me, the dogs were howling somewhere not far away and I was wriggling and squirming and willing the strain in my bladder to ease… It was not going to ease.

I gingerly crawled out of the tent and off the car roof. I squatted right below the car, too scared to move even a meter away and cursed myself for drinking so much beer right before bed. It was taking way too long and I stupidly had not brought my head torch down there with me. Though maybe it was better, if I was going to be mauled and eaten to death by a pack of hyena’s would it hurt less if I couldn’t see them?

We were all up at sunrise. After needing to pee I didn’t get back to sleep. Alex’s snoring was so violent it shook the whole car. I was relieved to hear both him and Michael stir so shortly after the first hints of light.

We bounded up the sand dunes, sinking knee-deep with each step we took. We would jump off the edge, falling and rolling down the sides, only to test our lungs and glute muscles running back up them again. Sand was in our hair, in our ears, in our cracks. At sunrise the sky was as orange as the sand but as the morning passed the lustrous blue of the sky made the fiery orange sand starker still. It felt like we were literally standing on the top of the world… and empty world and we were the only people in it.

Alex stripped down to his undies and I took a photo of him flying off the side of the dune, posing like super-man mid air and landing face-first in the sand.

It got to a time in the mid-morning when the sand scolded our feet and we descended off the side of the dune. The entire time we had still not seen another soul. The day had started off well, Michael seemed to have decided to stay with us after all, and the rest of Namibia lay ahead of us, waiting to be explored.

The First Two Days In Namibia

I didn’t have a bus ticket booked, but I packed my bags and met Alex at the bus station at 9:30 am to try my luck. There were no seats left but I was dying to get out of Cape Town so I chatted and flirted my way in to being let on… I sat in the driver’s cabin, wedged in between the driver and the host. I had the best seat on the bus with a panoramic view.

Alex and I spent the first day in Windhoek shopping around for hire cars. Michael was meeting us the next day and both Alex and I wanted to leave the capital as soon as we could. There wasn’t anything to see or do in Windhoek. It looked and felt quite European, there was a shopping mall, some big supermarkets, one cool art and crafts centre but that was really it.

As we were strolling down the main street in the city I heard someone yell out “Katie!” I hadn’t been called Katie for a few years now, but I still reacted and swung around to see Emily, an American girl I went to university in Amsterdam with. I always liked Emily, but never thought I’d ever see her again – definitely not in Africa anyway! She was living and volunteering somewhere in the North of Namibia but was travelling around with her mum and a friend. We arranged to go out for dinner that night.

Dinner was pleasant, as usual though I get sentimental about how transient everything in life is: saying goodbyes to a time, a place, a person, always makes my heart feel heavy. It was surreal to see my life in Europe meeting my life in Africa – two totally different worlds sitting at the one table eating zebra steaks and kudu kebabs.

Back at the hostel I sat alone in the dim lights of the closed and wrote in my journal, not quite ready to let thoughts from the night pass me by. The security guard came over and asked me what the date was. I told him and he pulled out his licence to show me that the next day was his birthday. He asked me for money so he could buy meat to celebrate. I don’t know why it annoyed me. If the bar had been open I would have bought him a drink. If I had food I would have shared it. What’s the difference? But for some reason it did bother me. I gave him the money anyway and went to bed.

The next morning I was the first one up in the hostel, as usual, and it was just me and the guard again. I asked him for a match to light the stove to make a coffee. I was being so petty about him asking for money that I totally forgot what the money was for. When I finally remembered that it was his birthday at 9am I wanted to kick myself… literally if it were possible to get a good kick into my own butt I would have! I let myself get so worked up about money that I had turned into someone I didn’t like.

By the time Michael finally arrived in Windhoek Alex and I were chomping at the bit to leave. We had gone to every car place and every camping store, written up and compared all prices and options and even converted everything to American dollars to make it easier for Michael. We had both agreed the best deal was a 4X4 which included everything – tents, sleeping mats and sleeping bags and pillows, cooking equipment, tables and chairs, a fridge, 80L of water, tools and first aid kits… seriously everything! The first thing Michael did was ask if we wanted to stay longer in Windhoek – “No way!” Alex and I both said simultaneously. There really was nothing here and we’d be back at the end of the trip to drop the car off anyway. Then Michael wanted lunch before he made any decisions. It was passed 2pm when he wanted to shop for animal horns for souvenirs for himself, Alex and I had hoped to get to the next town before sunset.

Then Michael announced that he wanted to check other car deals, we assured him that we checked them all. Then he wanted a 2WD because they were cheaper… even if quite impractical in a sandy desert. Then he added that because he had his own tent Alex and I should pay more than him, I had to take a few deep breaths. I could see Alex controlling his temper too. Michael decided to call the 4WD place we had originally chosen as the best option to ‘get a better deal’. After a few minutes of haggling Michael exclaims into the phone “deal we’ll take it!”

It turns out that he had gotten exactly the same deal that we did, only he just wasted 3 hours getting to the same point we were already at. But Alex and I were just relieved that a decision was made and we could fly out of there.

We got to the car hire place at 3pm. On the way Alex and I had wanted to stop for cash but Michael insisted we didn’t need it, that we would only need to pay on return. Michael was wrong. When we got there we had to leave again to go find money. We got a lift with one of the staff going home, but when we got back to the car hire and went to fill out forms Michael noticed his passport was left in the car that dropped us at the ATM. We had to wait nearly another hour for the driver to get it back to us. We definitely didn’t have time to stock up on supplies, but figured it could wait until we got to the next destination. I did get a dozen beers at our first petrol stop though.

When we finally got in the car and on the road sunset was already flirting with us. The drive was nice though, and it was a relief just to be on the road. We all took photos and listened to music and it all felt really good.

Until we got to our destination – Swakopmund.

We arrived at 9pm and the place was like a ghost town. Alex and I wanted to find a camping ground to park and set up camp. Michael wanted to eat. We had stopped an hour earlier and gotten food but Michael didn’t want to eat then, instead he waited until we needed to set up camp in the dark before he decided he needed to eat so badly it couldn’t wait. We went to a few different restaurants but they were all closed. We also tried a few campsites… they were closed too. Tensions rose as Michael insisted that the best way to find a place to camp was by drinking beer at a bar and chatting to the locals. Alex insisted that it was a better idea to go back out of town to a campsite that we had passed on the way. I just insisted on keeping the peace and trying to stay neutral. Finally we found a backpackers that was still open (but had no free beds) who gave us a list of all the hotels and campsites in Swakopmund. Michael and I called everyone. The majority of people who answered the phones said “sorry we shut at 10pm… yes that is right it is now 10:05pm so we cannot let you in”. It was starting to be more German than African!* Eventually we woke someone up who was willing to give us three dorm beds for the night.

We checked in to the dorm room, drank a couple of beers and went to bed.

*Namibia was colonised by the German’s