The end of that chapter

From Livingstone I took a bus to Lusaka the capital so that I could get a flight to Ethiopia – my last country of destination (which would also be the country most challenging and most rewarding to travel in).

From the bus window I decided I liked Zambia (even though it was only a very short time that I had spent there), it was rustic and colourful like West Africa, and most of the people I had met were friendly.

Getting off the bus in Lusaka I met Mika, a 23 year old Israeli girl. Her plan was to backpack around Africa for a year, her reward for completing the prerequisite time in the army.

She had already been to Ethiopia, and loved it! Though her brother lives there with his Ethiopian wife, so I think that made her experience there a hell of a lot easier.

She warned me that Ethiopians are proud but begged shamelessly (I didn’t know at that stage how that could work), she said they are stubborn, scam you and charge you for everything.

“But for every scammer there is a friendly person who welcomes you into their home and shares their food with you. In Ethiopia you never eat alone”.
We had dinner together at an all-you-can-eat Indian restaurant. She gave me plenty of tips about where to go and what to see, I duly noted everything down.

“And fleas… you will get fleas everywhere you go… you just get used to it.”

She said she loved Ethiopia so much that she wished she could go with me. I also wished that she could have. She was cool and insightful and even had very liberal views of the Israel-Palestine war, she had even marched in protest against the occupation.

We spent the next day together at an internet café, we changed money and haggled people to get the right prices for everything. She was so good at bargaining and didn’t take shit from anybody, I was impressed, though every Israeli woman I have ever met has been strong and assertive. However she was impressed with how calmly I refused the not so subtle sexual offers of a guy named God: "I want to feel your warmth" he said holding two fingers up.

Waiting for the plane to Ethiopia I pondered my place in the Southern countries of Africa. And this is what I wrote:
 
'In West Africa I had wanted so badly not be seen as a typical white person. I made sure I only ate street food, and drank at small bars with locals.

But in South Africa I ended up making friends with white people. I ate in restaurants and drank in bars where white people ate and drank. I stayed in large houses and lodges and went on private safaris and I ended up doing what all white people do here. Black people in Southern Africa are not going to the same places I was going and they are certainly not being served by white people and having white people clean up their mess after them.

My skin is white and for that reason, and that reason only, I have fallen squarely on one side of the racial divide. It couldn’t have happened any other way. That is just how it works here. Maybe it won’t always be like this. Hopefully it wont always be like this. But right now, in 2012 that is just how it is'.

Nearly Caught in My Criminal Act

I am in the running for being the most unorganized, ill prepared and just plain vague traveller.

Crossing the boarder to get into Zambia in the middle of the night I realized that I didn’t have US$5 or local equivalent to buy the visa to get in. I scanned the queue and focused in on two young looking white travellers. They were going to Livingstone as well, and I encouraged them not only to stay at the hostel I was booking in to but also to lend me the 5 bucks until then.

In Livingstone I had planned to get some Zimbabwean million and trillion dollar notes and wondered if I would have to cross the boarder into Zimbabwe somehow to get some. Right outside the backpacker’s door was a young hustler.
“Can I get you something?” he asked.
“Like what?”
“Anything at all. You want it, I get it”
“Ok, I want a trillion dollar note”
He pulled out a wad of notes from one of his many pockets.
There were a few ten and twenty million dollar notes, and a few ten and twenty billion dollar notes.
“Any trillion ones?”
“Come with me, one minute walk I can get you some. You smoke hash? Can get you hash!”

Got to love hustlers for their resourcefulness!

Later I was walking up the main street of Livingstone when I met Thomas. I was buying grilled corn on the cob from a street seller. He stopped to tell me that he was surprised and amazed to see a white person eating street food. I told him I was hungry for a proper meal, and did he know somewhere I could get good, cheap local food. He was even more shocked and said he will take me to eat Sima. Leading me there he kept asking if I was sure I wanted to go and if I was scared.

I ate my Sima, shredded salty spinach and beef with my fingers, as I had gotten used to doing in West Africa. Thomas was really and truly amazed then. He kept repeating that white people don’t eat with their fingers, and he did an imitation of someone very delicately eating with a knife and fork.

I didn’t understand a lot of what he said, he talked all the time, he talked fast, and most of his sentences ended in ‘what what’:

“White people come to Zambia with ideas about what what. But the black people here don’t want to work, they want to relax and what what. So the white people do this and that and what what… you understand?”

I nodded as though I did, I got the general gist, but I really felt like the key verbs in his arguments were missing.

And then he really shocked me.

Out of nowhere he asked me if I was a lesbian.

“What! No! Why? What! No!”

Perhaps I was a little too quick to answer and deny it. Perhaps my eyes were wide with fear and my ‘no’ was a little too high pitched and a little too defiant, because he asked me several more times.

Apart from in the little gay nook in Melville Johannesburg, no African had questioned my sexuality. In fact, I usually went to great lengths with my over embellished ‘boyfriend back home’ story. Thomas wasn’t buying the boyfriend story.

After he asked me a few times I told him that if he asks me again I’ll leave, and he didn’t ask again.

I wonder what would have happened if I had said yes. He may not have cared at all. He said he wasn’t gay but because he worked in a 5-star hotel on the Zambezi he had seen gay people before.

It didn’t feel right denying who I am, but I had just arrived in a country where homosexuality is illegal. It would have been confessing a crime to a total stranger. And worse than that, who I am and what I do is considered a mortal sin, and in most of Africa the law of God is even more powerful than the law of man.

The next day I went to Victoria Falls with the two young British girls who lent me the 5 dollars and shared a room with me in the hostel. They were only 19, had ridiculously posh accents and referred to their parents as ‘mummy and daddy’. We all did the 150m gorge swing together in the morning, I jumped on my own and they jumped tandem.

“Oh! I would like to buy the video” one said to the other “But I think I may have sworn when we jumped and I simply cannot let mummy know I used such language”.

The smoke that thunders was quite wondrous. You could hear it roaring from kilometers away. We slowly trudged the path around it, yelling at each other over its thunder. All around was just thick white mist that poured down on us like torrential rain. Everything was drenched, including my camera  which even though it had been wrapped tightly in plastic it stopped working.

The falls were powerful and impressive, even though we couldn’t actually see much.

I wanted to bunji over the falls, 111m free fall, it would have been awesome. But as I stood on top of the bridge looking down I realized it would only really be fun if there was someone there to egg me on, to cheer loudly for me and pet my back after. And for the first time in a while I felt lonely.

I cooked dinner at the hostel that night. I slipped over in the kitchen and hit my head, I burnt my hand on the fry pan and bit my tongue whilst eating. I cried out of frustration more than anything.

Before I left Livingstone the next day I went to a bureau de change office to get some USD. Yet another framed portrait of the president glared down on me from the wall.

“Why does your president never smile?” I asked the cashier.
“He is confused” he replied, “He is friends with Mugabe”
“That explains why he’s so bitter” I replied.

I would have liked to talk about politics more but his phone rang and he left the room.

Another Good Day

The weather in the national newspaper on may 8^th said:

“In the north hot.

In the Namib very hot.”

In Tsumeb it took me only a half an hour to hitch a ride. I jumped straight in the back of a ute where two other people were nestled in amongst bags, bedding and baskets of goods, I fell asleep within minutes. I don’t know how long I was asleep for, but maybe half way to my destination the driver woke me up. He told me he wanted me to sit in the cabin with him. I was comfortable in the back and didn’t want to move, I wondered why he wanted me and not one of the others up front, though maybe I could guess.

I wasn’t in the mood for small talk, so I was probably lucky that he wanted to do all the talking, but he talked so fast I only caught half of what he was saying.

He told me he was a criminal prosecutor, went to university in Wales and has travelled extensively. It surprised me then that he was carting a car full of passengers for extra dollars, but maybe that is why he let me on board for N$50, when initially he had asked for N$120. He said black people can’t be trusted, it wasn’t the first time a black person had said that to me about their own people. It always confused and worried me, just that morning I had been told that not so long ago Sunday school was teaching kids that God created them just to serve white people, and now I figured that those lessons were still engrained in people today.  He said that because black people, especially black men, can’t be trusted he wouldn’t feel right not taking me all the way to Grootfontein. Interesting still that a black man who picked me up hitch-hiking couldn’t stand the thought of a black man picking me up hitch-hiking.

Once again carrying my 22kilo pack I walked from place to place searching for a room in my price range. A young guy said hello to me outside a supermarket, as young guys always did, only that time I stopped to talk and ask him if he knew where a cheap bed was. He made a phone-call to someone who did know and he yelled into the phone “fuck you! Tell me where it is!” After some more yelling back and forth the person on the other end finally gave him directions. That whole interaction made me a little nervous.  

He walked me to my room for the night and on the way there he told me he was a hustler. “So how exactly do you make your money? What sort of things do you do?” He refused to tell me but kept saying “it’s nothing too dirty”.

He was 25 years old, and oddly for Africa we never introduced ourselves so I never did get his name. I ended up enjoying his company, and when we arrived at the back of the house I was staying in I bought us both an Apletiser and we sat together drinking them under a lemon tree.

He was quite a deep thinker, and very switched on. He told me how he doesn’t trust preachers, that he thinks alcohol ruins people, that black people breed too much even when they can’t afford to have children and that the world is obsessed with consumerism, brands and the new ‘this and that’. His big dream is to make lots of money, but not for himself, he wants to use it to buy truck-loads of food and go in to the slums and feed people. I ended up walking him back into town and not once did he ask for my details, money or a date.

My accommodation was a room at the back of someone’s house. It was very basic but cheap enough. The man of the house was sitting on the front porch drinking beer with his friends. His wife and her sister were so beautiful they could be models. They both had two scars under each eye, about an inch long. I asked them where it had come from and one of them explained to me that as baby’s they had vision problems so their parents cut them and rubbed the blood in their eyes to heal them. I wondered how both of them managed to get eye problems and if this was the same reason given for the numerous locals I had seen with the exact same scars.

They asked me if I would go to the shops with them, they had a bar in the house which was open to locals and they needed to stock it for the night. I agreed and ended up spending the afternoon lugging boxes of beer for them. They gave me a shot of caramel vodka as thanks.

I took myself out to dinner that night, at the only open eatery I could find. To entertain myself I imagined someone telling me I had to spend the rest of my life in that town and enjoyed the feeling of dread at the mere thought of it. It really didn’t seem like Grootfontein had much going for it.

When I got back to my room the dozen men drinking at the bar were already loud and drunk. I thought that if my hustler friend from early that day was there I’d have a drink with him, the slurred invites from the older men weren’t all that appealing. The door to my room was right next to the bar and it didn’t even close properly let alone lock. I lay awake until the early hours of the morning when the party finally dissipated.

The next morning I left early to get a bus that was going to take me all the way to Livingstone (in Zambia to see the Victoria Falls), which I thought was departing at 10am. At the station I was told by the attendee that it wasn’t actually leaving until 10pm. I didn’t want to take out anymore Namibian dollars as I’d be leaving the country soon, so I didn’t have any cash on me, but I did have some bread and biscuits and figured it wouldn’t be much fun but it also wouldn’t kill me.

I sat on the side of the road to read my book for the next ten hours… it’s not like I had anything else to do.

In the afternoon a woman named Daonetta walked over to me. Naturally she was curious why this young white woman was sitting in the sun alone on the side of the road. We chatted for a while and she invited me to her sister’s house to wait out of the sun and off the side of the road.

At her sister’s house there was her sister, her brother-in-law, their son, and both of her parents. I felt intrusive but they seemed happy I was there and were very welcoming. Her mother wanted to show me the hospital where she worked as a nurse in the children’s ward. So Daonetta and both her parents and I went for a drive around the town, Daonetta and I lying side by side in the back of the ute. We stopped in the wealthy streets to scrutinize the mansions (owned by the white people), followed by a guided tour of the hospital. It was much cleaner and better equipped than the other two hospitals I had visited in Africa so far.

Daonetta’s sister’s house was a quaint one-bedroom brick home, with no running water system, in a neighbourhood where only black people lived. Whilst we were gone her sister had cooked some rice and fish and insisted I eat with them. I knew it was rude not to, but they gave the two men and myself a whole fish each, while the three women and the child shared just one. I didn’t want a whole one to myself, especially when it meant that the others had to share, but I knew that it would be rude to refuse. Their generosity melted my heart.

The conversation was very pleasant, they asked a lot about my family at home, about Australia, about my opinions of Namibia. And then Africa’s Big Brother was on and the conversation ended. Africa’s Big Brother is surely the world’s most boring TV viewing. I had actually already seen an episode in Ghana a few months earlier and it definitely had not gotten any better since then. I pretended to be interested while they explained each character to me, the love triangles and the bitch fights and each one told me their favourite person and begged me to pick a favourite of my own.

After Big brother it was time to be dropped back at the station to get my bus. Danonetta’s sister asked me to take a group photo on my camera and upload it to their laptop (I was a little surprised they had a lap top actually). She said:

“We must have a photo of you here with us to show our friends, or else no one will believe that a white woman was at our house eating with us.”

In the car on the way to the station Daonetta got a text message from her sister. It said:

‘We miss Kai already’.

I am such a softy I wanted to cry.

When the bus pulled up we shared long hugs goodbye and I watched them through the window waving until the shape of them faded from sight.

The hospitality and friendliness of the locals from the last three nights in a row had been a saving grace for my spirit. In the North of Namibia I had begun feeling resentment and defeat, the people had been rude, and hostile and were either demanding money or falling down drunk. I couldn’t get out of Namibia fast enough.

But the experiences of my last few days in Namibia had rejuvenated me and renewed my hope. The night I had slept at the Megameno family’s house and ate birthday cake with them in the morning, the hustler and his wise view of the world and then Daonetta, her family and the fish.

worst photo of me ever! But decided to suck it up and post it anyway

Hitch-hiking Away

On May 5^th my diary entry began:

“Once again I am about to do something potentially very dangerous. Once again, I am about to do something potentially very stupid”.

I am surprised I hadn’t written more. I still remember the worry and the fear welling up inside me. I remember the lectures I was giving myself, telling myself that it wasn’t worth the risk. I was imagining what my partner, my mother and father, all of my friends would think if they knew what I was about to do.

It was the afternoon of the morning where Chris and I had said goodbye on the side of the road and I was going to hitch-hike alone, in Namibia, heading in the direction of Victoria Falls.

I waited in the scolding sun for about an hour before a truck pulled over and I hoisted myself in. I hate to say it, but because he was a local I assumed I’d have to pay for the ride, I managed to bargain him down to something reasonable, seeing as it was a work truck he wasn’t paying for the petrol. He was a gentle guy. He asked me if there was such a thing as AIDS in Australia. I told him that there was, but it is not as common in Australia as it was in Africa. He said that his 27 year old sister recently died from AIDS.

He insisted that it was dangerous for me to hitch-hike alone, and for a few extra dollars he’ll take me all the way to Oshakati. There he dropped me at the ‘cheapest’ hotel. They wanted N$380, my budget was N$100. I walked to the next place, they wanted N$500, and the next one after that wanted $450. My pack was heavy, the day was hot and it had seemed long, it was getting close to sunset and I was over it.

I was walking circles following vague directions to an advertised lodge when I asked a man if he knew where it was. He just happened to be heading there anyway for a ‘meeting’ but it turned out that lodge was even more expensive than all the rest.

I was about to heave the pack on my back once again when the man he was meeting offered me a bed in his house for the night. I thought it through for an awkward 20 seconds before saying that yes, I would take up his kind, though frightening offer.

I waited in the bar while the two men had their meeting, and that is where I wrote those simple two lines.

 I wondered:

‘How do you tell if someone is capable of rape and murder? You probably can’t. But travelling is full of risks. Risks you have to take. But is staying at the house of a man I know nothing about pushing it a bit too far? I wanted to trust people. I believed it was important to trust people. I had had a lot of luck up until that moment, was it a wave of luck I could continue to ride, or was my luck about to run out? Should I message someone from home and tell them what I am doing in case they don’t hear from me again? But I couldn’t do that, it would just worry them too much.’

But my luck didn’t run out, not at that point anyway.

The man who took me to his house, whose first name I shamefully and regrettably cannot remember (and I never wrote it down, but I later found out his surname is Megameno), drove me to his very nice house, in a very quiet suburb on the edge of Oshakati. He had a beautiful wife and four adorable and extremely polite children. He left not long after I arrived, I assumed he was going to a bar to drink.

His wife offered me food, I was hungry, but too polite to say yes. I already felt intrusive. He had invited me there, she had no idea I was coming to stay, and yet it was her who was left behind to deal with me and her four energetic children.

The eldest daughter was turning 16 the next day, she told me that when she grows up she wants to be a doctor or scientist. The 7 year old girl talked way too much, and was a bit of a know-it-all, but she was so sweet she insisted on carrying my bags to my room for the night and making my bed up for me. The 6 year old girl was very shy, and wanted to read her books mostly, and the 4 year old boy was cute but quite naughty. The kids were hanging off my every move and my every word, and were literally physically hanging off me all night too. They showed me their school report cards, and they took photos with my camera and asked non-stop questions about Australia. The woman was a school principal, she was telling me that children generally struggle to pass exams because they are all in English, but at home and out in the streets they don’t speak English. I remember thinking the same in Ghana, the school system doesn’t make sense and surely it slows students down?

At 6am the next morning there was a knock at the door. The woman was asking what time I had planned to leave. I thought maybe they were wanting me out in a hurry so I said in an hour. I packed my bags and  went to the kitchen to fill up my water bottle. The man was already up, he said  he wanted to drive me to a good spot to hitch hike but first I had to eat breakfast with them.

I found it a little cruel that on her 16^th birthday he made his daughter Albertina make everyone tea and eggs for breakfast. She had already spent the morning tidying up and sweeping the floor. Each of the kids took it in turn to ask how I had slept. Too adorable!

He took me out the front of the house and pointed to the university. It was expanding, he told me, and soon it would be the second biggest university in the country. He went on to talk about education today and in the past during the apartheid era. He talked about when he was at school and all he learnt about were frogs and lizards, while the white kids learnt maths and history. He said that as a kid the white kids in his neighbourhood would call him a monkey. In Sunday school the priest would tell all the black children that white people are made in the image of God and black people were created just to serve them.

His eyes were filled with a mix of sadness and hate and I didn’t know what to say, I felt guilty, I felt that by the colour of my skin I was one of those people teaching his young-self that he was created to serve me.

Our conversation was broken when we were called back inside. The younger children were sitting quietly at a small table taking it in turns to read each other stories. Those children amazed me; so intelligent, so respectful, and they absolutely adored each other and their parents. The younger three had told me the night before that their mother was beautiful like a queen, their father handsome like a king and their big sister was the best sister in the whole world.

After breakfast Albertina proudly pulled her birthday cake out of the fridge. They usually share cake in the afternoon, they told me, but because they have a special guest they were doing it at 8am. Cake was the last thing I felt like, but I ate the huge slab placed in my hands. No candles, or singing, and I wondered if anyone in Namibia does anything like that?

As soon as I swallowed the last bite the man stood up and asked if I was ready to go. I said my thanks and goodbyes and got in the car with Albertina and her dad. I was only in the car for a minute when I had an idea. I had bought a pair of earrings in Ghana which I was saving as a souvenir for someone, why had I not thought earlier to give them to Albertina as a birthday present? I wished my bag was in the seat beside me? Where the hell in my huge pack are they anyway? Could I ask them to wait while I search my bag for them? Is that tacky? When we pulled up I didn’t feel like I could ask them to wait, so I got out of the car and gave her nothing. Still to this day I wish I had given her those earrings.

The family asked me for nothing in return for their hospitality and kindness. The whole time I almost expected them to ask me for money, I actually waited for them to do so. I later felt guilty that I had thought the generosity was loaded. Then I felt even more guilty for not offering them anything. I would have, and probably should have given them some money for everything, but I really was expecting that they would soon enough they would mention a price.

In my experiences in the five African countries I had already been to, you rarely, if ever, get something for nothing from locals. This made my experience with the Megameno family that much more special, they helped me, took a genuine interest in me and wanted nothing in return. But still I wish I had given them something to show my appreciation.

My last nigth with Chris

Another perfect sunset, silhouettes and a haze of dust across the sky, it felt like we were walking in a dream. I don’t know why that afternoon was so different, but for some unexplained reason Chris and I walked for a whole hour before we were asked for money, and in the second hour only two people had asked us. It was a relief and we both felt a sense of peace just in being left alone for once.

Our walk led us to the hospital, and we walked straight in without seeing a single guard. The hospital was quite small, though a little decrepit it was clean, we only saw one nurse the whole time we were there. I assumed that visiting hours were over, but it was early enough for the patients to still be awake. It was not like the hospital in Ghana, reeking of desperation and disorder, it was calm there and quiet. The corridors were lined with glass windows and we could stare right in to the bed rooms. We only saw two people who seemed to be in pretty bad shape, one hooked up to a drip and the other so thin it brought flashes of David Edem to mind. Most of the patients were Himba people; it was quite a sight to see them in their cow-skin and heavy steal adornments, their thick clay coating and their matted dread locks, lying on crisp white sheets in hard cold rooms. Many of the Himba people had pulled their sheets to the floor and were lying beside the bed, perhaps a soft mattress takes as much getting used to as the hard floor did for us?

Afterward Chris and I sat and had a beer and a piece of BBQ-ed steak. We talked about travel and love and our hopes and dreams. I really like Chris. He is gentle and sentimental, passionate and brave and has a thirst for knowledge and people that is almost child-like. Even though we had only spent a week together, we had become very close. Travelling does that. When you have no one else but each other to rely on, when no one else understands you except each other, when you have to trust that person to protect you and keep you safe. I was feeling sentimental and sad. I had a feeling that it was going to be my last night with Chris. We had achieved what we had gone north to do – to see the Himba people. Chris wanted to head further north still to the Epupa waterfall, I needed to move on and say goodbye to Namibia, I still had Victoria Falls and Ethiopia and only a month left of my whole trip. Chris and I hadn’t actually talked about going separate ways, and I had a lump so large in my throat thinking about it that I couldn’t bare to bring it up with him then.

A man approached us and asked us for money. We tried to explain to him that fifty people or more a day ask us for money and we couldn’t possible say yes to everyone. He said he understood what we were saying and sat beside us and told us that Africans, particularly the Himba people, think that all white people are rich and that is why they get angry when we don’t give them money. We had a half hour long conversation where I actually thought he understood our point of view. But then he asked us again for money and exasperated we got up and left him there.

The next morning I woke up to a phone call from my partner. She told me she had been out the night before and slept with someone. My heart was pounding and my hands were shaking, even though we had an overseas arrangement actually meant it was ok to do so. But I thought about what Colin had been saying about sex the night before, and I was thinking about all the people I had met in Africa who thought sex meant nothing – it was something that all animals do, humans included, like eating and sleeping. And then my heart quietened down and my hands were steady again. We’d been apart for three months at that stage, it was starting to feel like three years.

It was a bad start to my day. I had had a troubled sleep, not knowing if I would stay with Chris or leave him that day. Not knowing how I would get out of that town, not really knowing where I was going next. I was feeling the same deep sadness as when I left Jo’Burg, thinking I would never see the friends I had made there again, and now I was thinking I will probably never see Chris again either. It made me feel nauseous. Decision making has never, and will never, been my forte.

I watched Chris go through his regular morning rituals that I found so endearing. The first thing he always did when he wakes up was rip the curtains open and declare with glee “the sun is shining!” like it wasn’t shining the day before, or the day before that, or every morning since he’d arrived in Africa. When he has his first sip of Earl Grey tea he always smacks his lips together and sighs “ah! That’s good!” like he has never tasted tea before.

When I told Chris that I was leaving that day he went into the bathroom and stayed there for what seemed like an awfully long time. He later told me that he was crying in there.

He watched me packed my bags (and couldn’t believe that I didn’t fold any of my clothes). He walked me to the start of the highway so that I could hitch-hike east, in the direction of Victoria Falls. The sun was hot and I was fighting back tears. We hugged and took a couple of photos and then it was time for him to go and try and get his ride North. As he walked away I let a single tear free.

About twenty feet away he stopped and turned back around.

“Friends for life?” he called to me.

“Friends for life!” I called back.

Twenty more feet after that he turned back around and blew me a kiss. Then he kept walking and once again I was on my own.

A reality check in a dream

 

Fairly late the next afternoon, Chris and I were bouncing around on the back of a beat-up old Ute (Colin our guide was in the passenger seat in the cabin). A group of men had to push the stalling vehicle until finally it farted into action and we rattled along a dirt track heading into the Namibian scrubland, heading deep into the big blank patch on our map. Both of us were in jeans and t-shirts, our faces pink and raw from the unyielding sun, goofy grins from ear to ear, we could taste the promise of something awesome to come. We were both standing up holding on to the flimsy sides; I think we were too excited to sit.

The all-Himba passengers (except for the skeletal goat) were staring us down, but Chris barely seemed to notice. I tried to smile at them, I tried to show my’ friendly foreigner’ face but it was received with stone-cold stares. I gave up on the locals and absorbed the surroundings instead. Herds of cows were led past us, beaten on the back by the young boys driving them. We hadn’t seen any villages yet but random groups of Himba people scattered the sides of the dirt path waiting for rides in to town.

My trance on the world going by was cut short when I felt this warm tickle on my bare toes. The goat was peeing on me. The Himba passengers nudged each other and giggled. My eyes met those of the goat and I couldn’t be angry, it was so scraggy and malnourished, and looked like it had copped its fair share of beatings in its life time. I tried to wriggle my toes out of the way, gently as though I didn’t want to hurt its feelings. I owe that goat a favour, the warmth of its wee had melted the ice amongst the passengers and the women in the Ute started to talk to me. They didn’t speak a word of English but tried to teach me some of their language. “Omudwandu” they rubbed their skin, “omuyapa: they touched mine. When we passed a cow or another car they would say a word and I would dutifully repeat it back to them. And then one of the men stood up beside me and sang to me. The women chuckled and I blushed.

The car was spitting up billows of dust which seemed to make the sunset a deeper scarlet colour. Chris was holding on to the cabin and facing the setting sun he faded in to a silhouette, around him the first stars began to glitter. In amongst cleared scrubs sat little villages of half a dozen or so little stick huts, a camp fire and Himba people going about their lives. One by one the others jumped off at their little villages and waved us goodbye, until it was just Chris and I, anxious to reach our destination.

When we finally spluttered to a halt the sun had well and truly set. Jeckey’s uncle, the driver of the Ute, led Chris, Colin and I to a little hut set apart from the rest of the village. This hut seemed bigger than the others, it could easily fit five adults lying side-by-side, it was raised off the ground on wooden stilts made of tree branches, the walls were made of mud clay, the roof was corrugated iron and inside it was bare except for a blanket on the floor. This would be where we slept.

We were instructed to leave our bags in the hut and the uncle led us to three women who were perched on the ground in the centre of the other huts.

‘What do you want to ask us?’

Colin interpreted, in very broken English, what the women said. They sat in bored silence waiting for us to throw a barrage of questions at them. It was all a bit awkward, set up like an interview. Neither Chris nor I had any real questions for them. We were there to just be silent observers or friendly guests. We weren’t anthropologists or politicians, but I got the feeling that those sorts of white intruders were what they were used to. The women kept waiting for us to ask questions. I had none. Chris was better than I was at easing the awkwardness and asking the usual sorts of questions: What do you eat? What do you believe in? Why do you cover your bodies in clay? Despite the awkward atmosphere it was peaceful out there. Quiet. A soft blue light made everything clear, cast from a nearly full moon.

Finally, the women gave us permission to leave and we went back to our hut. We weren’t even offered water, and I was worried we were meant to bring our own.

In the hut Colin, Chris and I made sandwiches from the supplies we had brought with us. Colin gave us the answers to the questions I wouldn’t have dared ask the women. ‘Wife sharing’ what I call ‘trading in women’ is common practice. When a baby is born it doesn’t matter who the biological father is, the husband must take responsibility for it. He then tells us that wearing condoms is common practice – which I do not believe at all. And he contradicts himself by saying that men will never perform oral sex on a woman because a man’s semen stays inside her and you don’t want another man’s in your mouth. He talked a lot about sex, and very graphically.

Sick of the way he was talking about sex and horrified at the way women are regarded I changed the topic, “The women kept telling us how poor they are… yet they own hundreds of cows” I asked him what a single cow would sell for. N$5000 – N$7000 he tells us. “Per cow!” I am shocked! They are really sitting on that much money? I try to tell him that all of my money and possessions combined equal 2 cows. He did not believe me. “Honest!” I protested.

As soon as Chris left the hut to pee, Colin asked me to write down my contact details in Australia: “then through the bank you can transfer money to me”.

The next morning we woke up with the sun, Chris had barely slept anyway, the cold stone floor hurting his back. I am lucky enough to be able to sleep anywhere, anytime, probably the reason I can travel so much.

We left the hut to explore the surroundings. Already the villagers were awake, inside a large wooden pen milking the cows. We stood watching long enough for one woman to invite me in and she showed me how to milk a cow. I crouched down beside her and gave it a go… nothing came out, not a single drop. She laughed and showed me how to do it again. Chris, another woman and some children stood beside me watching. I tried again, and still no milk came out. How hard could it be to milk a damn cow? Pretty hard is seems.

Colin came to take us away from the women and the cows and over to the uncle, it was time to present him with the gifts that we brought. He sat on a directors chair drinking beer, even though it was only 7am. We handed him the bag of oranges, 10 kilos of maize, drum of oil, box of tea and two kilos of sugar. We had also brought sweets for the kids, which neither Chris nor I wanted to do, but Colin had insisted we should. The kids that had taken to following us around all politely waited while Chris handed them all two sweets each.

The uncle did not look happy with our gifts. “Where is the tobacco?” he asked Colin to ask us. We hadn’t gotten any tobacco. A very young child, of maybe two or three was leaning between his knees and he gave the child the beer in his hand and shooed him away. The child happily held the 700ml bottle of beer that was half of the size of him and guzzled its contents. Chris and I flashed each other looks of disapproval but said nothing. Then the uncle opened the bag of sugar and filled the children’s cupped hands with it. The children shovelled the handfuls of white sugar into their mouths, and again Chris and I shared looks of reproach.

The women brought over bowls of sour milk for us. I gagged as soon as I saw it. I thought ‘no way can I drink that’. Chris went first. When he took a sip there were curdled chunks of milk on his lips and I had to get up and walk away, my eyes were watering and I honestly thought I was going to puke. But I had to have a sip next. I stared into the bowl, the water had separated from the solids and it smelt just like off- milk. I tried not to breathe in the smell as I took the smallest of sips and swallowed it quickly, hoping it would slide straight past my taste buds. I passed the bowl on and listened to my stomach turn. To my disgust, Chris actually had another sip.

The uncle swigged from his hipflask and told Colin that if we wanted to stay another night we would have to go back into town and buy more gifts for them. I was pissed off, we weren’t even offered water and he expected more gifts.

One woman took us in to her hut and showed us the cow skin she sleeps on. Her spare head pieces and steel jewellery hung from the walls around us. On the floor was tubs of the animal fat and clay that the women smear all over their bodies. She scooped a dollop and rubbed it on my arm and leg. She asked to see my tattoos, and was shocked by the ones on my back and asked me if it bleeds. She told me they are beautiful. A crowd of children were cramming in the door way of her hut, passing around the bag of sugar we brought and scoffing it by the handful until the bag was empty and they tossed it behind them onto the ground.

She pointed to the cow-skin on the floor and told us that she needed a mattress and blankets and would Chris and I buy them for her. We said no. She thrusted jewellery in my face and told me to buy it. I shook my head no. Then she asked me to giver her some medicine to make her pregnant. I told her that no such medicine exists. She didn’t believe me and asked me again to give her pills that will make her fall pregnant. Again I told her that no such pill exists. And she glared at me angry.

Chris, Colin and I went for a walk to the neighbouring village. We stopped to watch a woman making butter, she even said we could take a photo and didn’t want money for it.  We passed a young girl who was shaking large flasks of milk in the sun. This is how they get soured milk. In Australia it is just off milk and I couldn’t understand why they don’t just drink it fresh. Colin sleazed on to the girl, and later told us that he had been trying for months to get her into bed.

We got back to the village from our walk at only about 10am and from a distance I could see that the uncle was mad. He wanted to be in town hours ago, he yelled to Colin who translated to us. I assumed his hipflask was empty and it was past beer o-clock. He never told us he wanted to leave early, we assumed we would at least have gotten a full day there, though to be honest I was ready to leave, they had made it perfectly clear that we were not welcome unless we were giving them tobacco, mattresses or magic pills.

Standing up on the tray of the Ute heading back into town I had a rare “wow I am in Africa” moment. Those moments didn’t happen enough. Usually I am so caught up in my own head and thoughts that I am never truly present in the moment. But standing on the back of that Ute, with the already scolding sun burning the back of my neck, I watched women walking the side of the road with buckets on their heads, we passed donkeys herded by young semi-naked boys and some totally traditional Himba women were sitting at my feet and I thought with elation “this is Africa”.