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.