Christmas In Nam

I have a complicated relationship with Christmas, I have long ceased to believe in Jesus, virgin birth, wise men (we’re all damn fools), or even that religion is necessarily a force for good, but despite myself the first time I hear the strains of ‘Silent Night’ in November, my heart lifts for a very brief moment.  It wears off pretty fast, there are very few Christmas carols that I actually like, Silent Night’ is the only one I can think of right now, and the extreme carols bombardment we are subjected to pisses me off so completely that I avoid shops as much as possible and leave the car radio switched off until January, when the horror of it has passed. I loathe the waste that Christmas insists on, the buying and giving of kitsch, useless things manufactured specifically to go into landfills. Now that I no longer have small children to share this festival with I am generally able to ignore it, nonetheless somewhere in my make-up there is a vestigial stump of Christmas spirit, a hankering for the magic and wonder I once felt, so many years ago.

Being a bit of a control freak, just a tiny bit, as people I live with will eventually admit if you pushed them hard enough, I had phoned ahead and made a booking for Christmas lunch. Not having a clue as to where would be good, I had initially tried the yacht club in the belief that all yacht clubs across the globe would be serving a passable Christmas lunch, but found that this particular yacht club was closed for Christmas. They referred me to The Raft, in the words of Sean Penn in I am Sam, ‘an excellent choice’. What a stunning place! It is instantly my favourite restaurant in the whole wide world. Built on stilts, close to the mouth of the Walvis Bay Lagoon, it has a bit of a Kevin Costner, Waterworld feel to it. The food is pretty good, but the attraction is the location, utterly awesome! Where else can you eat a meal watching the antics of pelicans, flamingos, busy little terns and graceful seagulls, not to mention the occasional dolphin and Cape fur seal? Today they offer a variation on the traditional Christmas fare with roast lamb and roast pork in addition to their standard menu. I opt for the trio of fish from the standard menu, ‘Fillets of Kingklip, Monkfish and Butterfish all simply coated in seasoned flour and flash-fried in palm nut oil’ they serve this with chips and crisply cooked fresh vegetables. Pretty damn good, way better than oily or bone dry turkey with cranberry jelly that half the rest of the world are stuffing themselves with today.

 The Raft Restaurant - new favorite... ever! 

My daughter, Therese, Christmas lunch at The Raft

Busy little tern, from the window of The Raft

There is an item on the menu that is a little beyond belief -‘BUSHMAN PLATTER; brochette of flame-grilled Oryx Sirloin, Beef Fillet, Kudu Sirloin, BBQ Pork Spare Ribs and Cajun Chicken Strips, served with mushroom sauce, pepper gravy and sweet & sour sauce, accompanied by your choice of Asian fried Rice, shoestring French fries, baked potato, vegetable couscous or basil mashed potato and a garnish salad.’ Holy smoke, if I ate all of that I think I would fall down next to the table and go into spasms for a few hours. We live in a world of excess, unless you happen to be one of the unlucky majority that can barely scrape enough calories to make it through the day. Oh well let’s leave this rant for another day, it’s Christmas, I’m with my sister and daughter and having a really great time.

I recall that Walvis Bay had exactly one restaurant way back when. Café something or other, typical of what was on offer in any small town in Southern Africa in the sixties and seventies, chrome and Formica tables and chairs, almost certainly owned and operated by a Cypriot, not licenced to serve alcohol, but would do a katemba (1 part cheap red wine and 1 part Coke, served in a pint beer glass with ice) at a price. The menu consisted of various pies with gravy and limp salad, tenderized steak and mash potato, and the pièce de résistance, ‘le mixed grill’, in some ways a little like the ‘BUSHMAN PLATTER’ I suppose, a piece of tenderized steak, grilled Russian sausage, fried onions, lamb chop, fried slice of calf’s liver, fried egg, fried tomato, toast and limp salad. For dessert you could tuck into a hefty slice of Madera cake with custard and/or ice cream. For your unwilling soldier that had been subsisting on the awfulness that was usual fare served at Rooikop, this was as close to heaven as it got. Things certainly have changed around here, there seems to be a restaurant of some description on every corner, though the café I once knew is nowhere to be found.

After lunch we take a walk, traditional attempt to walk off the Christmas lunch traditional excess, even though the wind is starting to pick up, vaguely I remember that afternoon wind is a feature of this area. We pass the public swimming pool and picnic area and peek over the fence, lots of people are having lots of fun in a non-Eurocentric way.

A peek over the fence at the 'other' half

Around the corner we discover the Walvis Bay Waterfront, more Kevin Costner Waterworld, utterly charming, but I predict will all too soon be bulldozed and replaced by some awful generic mall thing, maybe in fake Tuscan or Greek Isle motif. I know, I’m a cynical bastard, still I am going to enjoy this exactly the way it is with no thought for the future. Except for the very near future and make note of a few establishments that serve seafood or can take you on an excursion, a harbour cruise seems interesting and as far as I can tell relatively inexpensive.

 Walvis Bay Waterfront

We make it back to the car, having walked off a few of the lunch calories, actually as I had salad for a starter, fish and only a very small dessert, I’m feeling fine, virtuous almost. We decide on a drive rather than head to the guest house and lie down on our beds. We take a route south past a new and very swanky residential area, not really knowing where we are going, but destination does not matter. We go past a resort with chalets right on the beach, I remember the name, I’d tried to book in there, but they had been fully booked, pity it looks nice. Soon we leave the town behind, dunes to the left, bay to the right and salt pans ahead, this is a paradise for flamingos and artists, colours and contrasts are utterly amazing, whoever would have thought that salt pans were so interesting? Salt is apparently the most important export of the area, I thought it was uranium, or at least fish, well there you are, better than guano (bird shit) as it once was not that long ago.  Before the invention of the Ostwald and the Haber–Bosch processes, barely a hundred years ago, bird shit was the principle source of nitrogen for explosives and fertilizer, it was known as ‘white gold’ and the Skeleton Coast had many little islands that were covered in layers of the stuff, several metres thick. No guano to harvest here though there are birds aplenty, flamingos poop into the water, which is perhaps one reason that waters of Walvis Bay are so rich in marine life.

Colours and contrasts on the way to Pelican Point, salt making in progress

There are two species of Flamingos that inhabit the area, the Greater Flamingo and the Lesser Flamingo, apparently they are easy to tell apart, but my birding eyes are out of practice and I’m not exactly sure which are which, they often flock together. Both species wade in shallow water, the Greater eats shrimp and the Lesser eats blue-green algae, the Greater is less pink with solid red on the wing tips and the Lesser is pink over the whole body with some red speckles on the wings. The beaks are the easiest way to tell them apart, the Lesser flamingo has a darker beak whilst the Greaters’ beak has only a dark tip. When flamingos fly and especially when they land, is a study of skill and grace with the oddest of equipment, like a flying hockey stick, long neck stretched out in front and equally long legs behind, in the middle are the wings and a very slender body. We stop and watch them in the bay, they work their legs backwards and forwards as if in time to bebop, they do this to agitate the mud to get at the shrimp. It’s just a wonderful sight, made even more magical by the appearance of three pelicans that glide in and land on the water like 747’s  The wind is blowing strongly now, but the birds don’t seem to notice, neither in flight nor on the water.

Group of Lesser Flamingos

Mixed group... see if you can spot the difference. My photos don't do them justice, they flock in vast, and I mean vast numbers. 

Pelican in Flight 

I switch on roaming data on my phone and the GPS/map feature to figure out where we are heading. I have learned to do this very judiciously as the roaming package was outrageously expensive for the smallest amount of data imaginable. It turns out that we are on our way to Pelican Point, going along a narrow spit of land that forms the southern end of the bay. I believe there is a lodge at the end of it, but we don’t manage to get there, the condition of the road gets worse and less than half way to the point I turn back, the VW Polo is at the limit of its rough road ability. On the way back we stop to get some pictures of a strange green and purple grass that grows next to the road and discover, on closer inspection, it’s not a grass at all, but a succulent.

Purple and green 'grass'

I had some misgivings about selecting Nambia for this holiday, but it is turning out to be such a fascinating and very different place. My sister has spotted a town called Solitaire on the map, so our next excursion will be Solitaire by way of Dune Seven, a true mountain of shifting whispering sand – eat your heart out Johnny Cash.      

To Wallfish Bay

The Afrikaans word “walvis” (pronounced “vull” to rhyme with dull and “fis” almost like “fizz”, but more of an ‘s’ on the end), actually translates to “whale”, but many English speakers refer to Walvis Bay as “Wallfish Bay”, which sounds funny to my ear, so I have always used the Afrikaans. 

Apparently it got this name because of the large numbers of southern right whales that were drawn to the bay by the presence of a great deal of food, it was then, and still is, a place where marine life is rich, varied and abundant. Walvis Bay has a very interesting history thanks to its geography. It is the only natural deep water harbour for hundreds of miles north and south along the southwest African coast line. The Cape Colony, on behalf of Great Britain, annexed the bay together with a small arc of surrounding land, amounting to about 430 square miles, in 1878, shortly before Germany annexed the rest of what is now Namibia. The arrogance, greed and generally disgraceful behavior of our recent colonial ancestors is quite breathtaking when viewed from the zeitgeist prevailing today. Nonetheless it was a canny move to grab this enclave, Walvis Bay is the gateway to Namibia and remained part of South Africa until 1994, when the government of South Africa handed it back to Namibia, A very fair thing to do in my view as it had no business not being part of Namibia from the beginning. In any event this small port city (population 85,000) is where we are heading.  

Map - predates Namibian Independence

   

My own history with this city goes back to those dark days when I was stationed there as a conscripted lowly gunner in a field artillery regiment. Our unit was not actually stationed at the barracks in town, but right at the edge of the enclave, beyond the dunes, at the base of a great big lump of red sandstone known as "Rooikop"… Red Hill. Of all the postings that a conscript could get, this one was regarded as the shittiest, only marginally better than a stint in detention barracks. The accommodation was primitive, all 120 of us slept in a corrugated steel aeroplane hangar that we shared with eight 5.5 inch field guns. The hangar had no windows and massive doors on rails that had to be dragged open and closed, an effort that required at least three men pushing with all their might. The floor was rough concrete that sloped towards the doors. Although we had electric lights these were switched on or off from the duty officers’ room, there were no electric outlets, which was a blessing in disguise, we were at least not expected to iron our uniforms and nobody played loud radios deep into the night. When the wind blew off the desert in summer there was no relief from the heat and dust, and when the temperature dropped on winter nights to below zero, which it occasionally did, the temperature inside the hangar was the same as outside.

Rooikop - as close as we could get to it, it is still a military base and restricted

The bathroom facilities were even more primitive. We shared five showers and three wash basins and as water was brought in by truck, running out of water was a regular occurrence, sometimes in mid shower. I recall that I always shaved my downy cheeks, brushed teeth and washed my face using my steel helmet filled with water taken from an outside faucet rather than wait for a basin to come available. The shower block was constructed out of 44 gallon drums filled with sand and a flat tin roof, when the wind blew as it often did, it howled through the gaps between the drums like avenging angels. Toilets were the worst of all, you did it straight into a tank, no running water, just through a horrible bloody hole, sometimes in the company of three others, privacy in the army was not big on the priority list. The tank was emptied twice a week by a truck that we called ‘the honeysuckle’. It is funny that although I can easily recall the toilets, my memory of actually making use of the facility eludes me completely, it is as if those memories have been completely erased in the interest of self-preservation.

We had no kitchen at Rooikop so all of our meals were trucked in from the main base in Walvis Bay about 15 Km away, you can just imagine how yummy our food was.

Being far away from the scrutiny of any civilian authority, it was also a paradise for sadists, an animal that all military establishments seem to be well supplied with. I suffered under a particular bastard with the inappropriate name of Major Human, Major Inhumane would have been so much more accurate. However, Rooikop had four positives, the officers went home at 5 pm and left us mostly to our own devices until morning, it was in the desert proper, which I grew to love, the threat of denying weekend passes was utterly meaningless and we somehow tapped into a seemingly endless supply of good quality, inexpensive weed. Smoking weed is of course a thing of the past, but I am looking forward to seeing Walvis Bay again.

   

To get there I decide to take the longer route, the B2, which tracks an arc, north from Windhoek to Okahandja, west to Karabib and Usakos, south west to Swakopmund and then a final 30 Km directly south to Walvis Bay along the Skeleton Coast. It is 400 Km, a whole 50 Km longer than the C26, but it has the distinct advantage of being paved 100 % of the way. I have discovered that outside of the main towns and cities, Namibia has relatively few paved roads. The absence of touring motor cycle rentals makes sense now, my Suzuki Boulevard would be close to useless, if you want to ride a motorcycle here, you’d better get something that can handle gravel and loose sand, maybe next time I come here that’s what I should do. I am starting to realize that the only way to really get around here is with something a lot more robust than a VW Polo Vivo, a 4x4 would have been much better.

The trip passes very pleasantly with conversation, six and a half years catch-up… so much gossip, so little time, the Kardashians have got nothing on my family. Once we get beyond several miles of road works close to Windhoek the road settles down to a single lane highway, the blacktop is in reasonable nick, though the lane is quite narrow. I’d guess this is the most important artery in the country, linking the second most populous area and the only harbour, to the most important city, still it is not much more than a typical country road that you’d find anywhere in Ontario, such as between Zephyr and Mt Albert. The speed limit is 120 Km/h, but the traffic speed is mostly about 130. The VW Polo holds its own, provided that you work the gears. There are of course plenty of assholes that feel they really do need to go at 160 even though the road is not safe at that speed. The scenery is nothing short of magnificent. Close to Windhoek its hills and dales, but that does not last long and soon it is all flat plains with thorn bush and mountains in the distance. We cross many rivers, but not a single one has a drop of water, this is supposedly the rainy season, but it is as dry as dust, and it gets dryer as we go west. Next to the road we spot warthog (Pumba for those whose experience of African wildlife is restricted to the Lion King). It’s hot, it’s dry, it’s empty of people, it’s just wonderful.

Hills and dales near Windhoek 

Namibian River - bone dry!

Usakos - if I recall correctly, pretty anyway

As we get closer to the coast the bushes shrink and the length of the grass shortens until it disappears all together. We are in the Namib Desert, believed to be as old as 80 million years, the oldest desert on earth. This is moonscape, it is so different to what we are used to; conversation dries up as the awe of the scenery fills our minds. This is what I remember from my army days, walking out with a water bottle into the baking, empty and completely silent desert, paradise for an introvert that hated noise and constantly having people around. This was my weekend pass, where I got in touch with my sanity again, this was the iota of freedom I had. I now remember why I made that promise to return. To the right several miles away we spot Spitzkoppe, German for pointed peak. It is a group of bald granite peaks, like nine or ten really enormous boulders. The granite is more than 700 million years old and the highest peak rises about 5800 ft. above sea level, about half that much above the desert floor. I’d love to get closer, but note that the road to get there is marked as 4x4 only.

Spitzkoppe 

Emptiness, divine

Moonscape

Always life no matter how dry

 A few miles from Swakopmund fog rolls in from the ocean and the sun sets quietly obscured by it. We are by now pretty darn hungry, but it appears that Swakopmund is closed for Christmas Eve. I recall that this is a very German town and Christmas Eve is when Germans do the family get together, around the O Tannenbaum I suppose. We drive around in mounting despair, the packet of biltong we shared along the way is long gone. For those that are not in the know, biltong is sort of like jerky, only tastes really good, there is a butcher in Oakville, Ontario, that makes some pretty good biltong. We had envisaged a pleasant supper in a German style establishment, eisbein, sausages, steaming piles of cabbage, bratkartoffeln, perhaps an oompah band and serving wenches with large boobs carrying great fistfuls of beer tankards…well perhaps the last item was only on my list. Swakopmund is supposedly a bit of a party town, but it ain’t doing so tonight!

My sister mentions that she is sure that there is a casino here, which must surely be open, casinos never close (something about the work of the devil is never done) and at the casino there certainly will be some establishment that will serve us dinner. We are still wondering where the casino could be when we realize that we are actually passing it at that moment. The Mermaid Casino appears to be very quiet, but we decide to try it anyway, nothing ventured, nothing gained. We find one of those ubiquitous Chinese restaurant all red and gold, dragons and temple lions, it’s open, not exactly pumping, but there are customers and it is serving dinner. The service is good, if light on the serving wenches and tankards, and the food is entirely passable. I settle for a bottle of Tafel Lager to accompany the rice, noodles and sizzling this and that, in the end it works out pretty well.

After dinner we follow the coast road south to Walvis Bay, we can just make out the ocean to the right, perhaps because of the lights of the many ships riding at anchor. On the left is a range of massive dunes, I know this from memory only as it is too dark to see anything. We pass the lights of a few beach village developments, the buildings are all new, sort of Middle Eastern style. They certainly did not exist the last time I came down this road, hitchhiking back from Swakopmund after a weekend of A.W.O.L. I remember that trip as if it were yesterday. A little fellow with a large wife picked me up in a small car, a Datsun, if memory serves me. The wife held a baby on her lap and the man had very greasy, dandruff ridden hair and chain smoked the entire trip. All the windows were shut so as to ensure that the baby did not catch a chill, as the wife explained. This was on a hot mid-afternoon driving through a bloody desert. At the time I smoked as heavily as my meagre army pay allowed, but I remember stepping out of the car in Walvis Bay gasping for air with my throat on fire, no doubt the poor child has since either made it as a jockey due to seriously stunted growth or is breathing through a little tube in its throat. No such problem tonight, my daughter has never smoked and both my sister and I are ex-smokers, as virtuous as prostitutes taken holy orders.

Walvis Bay is quieter than Swakopmund, but this suits us just fine, we are tired, well fed and seriously ready for bed. It has been an awfully long day. I know three things, the guest house is on Sam Nujoma Drive (every town in Nambia has a Sam Nujoma drive, street or avenue), which runs north/south and the place is called ‘The Shifting, Whispering Sands’. It takes me less than five minutes from entering the town to stopping in front of it. Tula and Tilla welcome us to their establishment, it is spotlessly clean and comfortable, but ever so slightly reminds me of Fawlty Towers. Tilla makes an older, but perfect Sybil and Tula is Basil down to his toenails, later we will meet a small black dude that is a dead ringer for Manual. As we unpack the car I realise that I cannot be happier.

Nam

I am only a few kilometres from the spot where my mother lost her life 46 years ago when SA 228 crashed, seconds after takeoff, a life changing event for my family. Nonetheless I do not think about this too much, there has been too many gallons of water flowing under too many bridges since then. I'm alert and awake as the wheels of the Airbus A319 touch down at Windhoek's Hosea Kutako International Airport, despite the 37 hours elapsed time since boarding a plane at Pearson international. The last few hours have been spent chasing the setting sun as we flew directly west from Johannesburg, now darkness has finally descended. The heat of the day remains to greet me as I descend the aircraft on the stairs rolled up for us. We walk across the apron to the terminal building, no retractable walkway to ease you from the plane into a cool air-conditioned airport building. Actually as it turns out the building isn't air-conditioned at all, leaving your weary traveler gasping for breath. On the plus side there are no silly HSBC adverts making sage sounding, but generally stupid statements about the future, and the friendly smiling ground crew that line the route welcoming you to Namibia. All is good.   

Chasing the setting sun

It’s always exciting to arrive at your destination, especially when it’s a fairly ‘exotic’ one, but this is extra special for me. My daughter runs up and greets me in the immigration hall, I’m a little puzzled by this, but the emotion of the reunion pushes the question to one side, it's been nearly three years since I waved her goodbye as she left Canada to follow a life in South Africa. As it turns out I neglected to supply her with the address of the place we are booked into, so although her flight landed an hour before mine she has not been allowed through until I arrive and provide this piece of crucial info. This amazes me as a five minute internet search will yield up several thousand addresses of places to stay in Namibia – you only have to supply one, and no need to validate it. The idiotic questions employed by passport control seems to be standard across all nations. Not as idiotic as the so called airport security universally imposed since 911…all that searching, stripping, limits on gels, no nail files and so on is completely negated by the existence of restaurants and shops on the other side of the security checks. I am all for security and would be happier with more inconvenience, but actual meaningful security.  However, I digress and will leave this little rant for some other time. I’m embarking on a 17 day vacation in warm and sunny Namibia with my daughter and for some of the time, my sister. I am jet lagged, sleep-deprived and beyond grubby, but nonetheless as happy as a sand boy. I believe that sand boys are pretty happy creatures.

Perhaps I should answer a few questions that may be forming in a reader’s mind. Why Namibia and why is the Not-so-Easy-Rider blogging about this. The last time I visited Namibia, or ‘Nam’, as we called it in imitation of our US counterparts doing something similar in Vietnam, was almost exactly 36 years ago. I was nineteen and finally going home after two years as an unwilling, but obedient soldier, very small cog in the Apartheid military machine. Back then despite the misery of the existence I had led, I recognized the tremendous and extremely varied natural beauty of the country and promised myself that I would come back under more pleasant circumstances. I’m not entirely sure why, until now, I have not returned despite ample opportunity. When I decided to meet up with my daughter, Cape Town, where she lives, would have been a more logical choice, but ‘same old, same old’ came to mind and actually I loathe Cape Town during the Christmas holiday season, it heaves with people, everything is fully booked and the prices go through the roof. Then I thought of Nam and that old promise to come back. 

The idea of renting a motorcycle and doing some touring with her on the back did occur to me, but I knew that she wouldn’t enjoy that sort of trip, I didn’t get much further than Googling motorcycle rentals, there are a few places that offer rentals, but I could only find for road scrambler type bikes. Sorry to disappoint those that only want to read about motorcycling, this is not a motorcycle trip, for now, sadly, I’m the Easy–Driver.  But as this blog is also about my travels, I've decided to do a few posts on this trip…believe me it’s shaping up to be pretty damn interesting. I’m fast realizing that this is an awesome place to visit, on a motorcycle or off it.

We get a taxi to take us to the lodge we are booked into, the quote is N$400 (about CAD 40), it seems excessive, but then I discover that the airport is more than 40 km from the city and another 5 to the lodge, so I guess that it’s reasonable. I get my first experience of the Namibian interpretation of the gentle art of driving a car, but put it down to just this one crazy taxi driver, grit my teeth and buckle up. The 40 km drive passes awfully quickly, on a few occasions I swear I see episodes from my life flash before my eyes. We go through what looks like a very new suburb, big expensive looking houses with high walls, topped with electric fences. I am reminded of Pretoria.  We pass a large estate with a long fence of black and gold pickets with an odd looking coat of arms repeated every few yards. “The residence of Sam Nujoma?” I ask, displaying my general ignorance of the current politics of the country I am visiting. It turns out to be the residence of “His Excellency Hifikepunye Pohamba”, the current president. Our old adversary, Sam Nujoma has retired after what I believe, objectively, can be said to be a very decent go at running the country. In the short time since landing I sense a feeling of prosperity, pride and stability…crazy taxi driver notwithstanding.

Crazy Taxi driver dude (at least got us there) 

  

I have booked us in at a place called Arebbusch Travel Lodge, It looked nice on the website, was reasonably priced and the online booking was easy and logical to work with. The lodge itself does not disappoint in most departments, our chalet is clean, reasonably furnished, with a new and properly functioning air-conditioning unit (an absolute must in this part of the world). The only negative is that the place is not really as “in the bush” as I had been led to believe, it looks like it was just that not very long ago, but the city has grown towards it and  shortly it will be just an enclave. Nonetheless once inside the lodge enclosure you certainly get the feel of being out in the bush, the units are spaced reasonably far apart, with quite thick thorn bush between them. There is tranquility, African night sounds and the heat has subsided enough to sit on the verandah and enjoy at least some of my first African evening for six-and-a-half years. It’s wonderful and we have lots to catch up, but I struggle to keep my attention from wavering, I am exhausted and soon have no choice but to shower and bed.  

I’m awake before dawn, my internal time mechanism is completely screwed up, but I’m not grumpy about being up, sitting on the verandah and experiencing an African dawn is one of the things I’m here for. Despite the proximity to the city, I hear a hyena in the distance, I guess its concluding business for the night before settling down to sleep the day away, a sensible strategy here where the weather report is predicting 37 degrees Celsius. I, on the other hand, am looking forward to some of that, had enough of sub-zero stuff for now. The sky turns from black to purple and then to pink and the birdsong rises to a crescendo. The growing traffic noise from a main road about 500 meters away reminds me that I’m not actually deep in the bush, but the mood holds, it’s good to be back in Africa.

Sunrise in Windhoek

I boil some bottled water for coffee, there are no warnings that the tap water isn’t drinkable, but it has a funny smell and tastes a little unpleasant. Windhoek is a very dry place and I know that a fair percentage of water is reclaimed, Fremen style, if you get my drift. Gives the term ‘eau de toilette’ a whole new meaning. Of course I know that it has been purified, still I think I’ll stick to drinking bottled water and beer. The beer, I recall, is worth drinking, this country has a strong German heritage despite the hundred years that have passed since the end of German rule, and that heritage is stamped strongly on the brewing standards – an excellent place for a bit of Teutonic rigor in my humble opinion. The coffee I made is pretty horrid with the lodge supplied sachets of instant coffee and chicory blend (yuk) and non-dairy creamer, despite my serious coffee dependency I don’t manage much more than a few sips.

Breakfast (included in the rate) is a reasonable affair, the usual fest of eggs, bacon, sausages, fruit, muesli, Kellogg’s poisons, baked goods, toast, juice and yogurt set out for the customers to serve themselves. I stick to eggs, bacon and sausage and try the brewed coffee, only slightly too weak. We take a table outside that we share with a praying mantis and watch the antics of the weaver birds in the tree next to the verandah, the males desperately showing off the nests they have built to attract a female. Bit like the male of the human species, only we use Ferraris, Platinum Amex cards or whatever the income can stretch to. Of course the tactic doesn’t work as well since the equality between the sexes has improved, unless it really is a Ferrari and a holiday home on the French Rivera that you can flash around. The male weavers are having as little success as far as I can tell, at least ten of them are trying to impress two ladies that do no more than view the nests on offer in a decidedly disinterested manner.

 Weaver nests at Breakfast

Sharing the table with a Praying Mantis 

After breakfast I phone a taxi to take us to the Avis location, which turns out to be only 3 Km from the lodge, I could have walked, but then the sun is already shining with a ferocity that I’m not exactly acclimatized to.  The group B vehicle I booked is a VW Polo Vivo 1.4, known elsewhere in the world as the Polo MK4. I note with some amusement that the car has a slightly smaller engine displacement than my Suzuki Boulevard motorcycle and produces slightly less horsepower, 74 versus 77.8. Nonetheless it feels reasonably gutzy, handles well, has enough space inside for three adults and luggage and is air-conditioned… and the rate Avis charge (CAD 670 for 16 days) is definitely not over the top.  I am a little nervous of driving, not sure how I’ll manage a stick shift again since I have mostly driven automatics for the past 6 years, but more concerned about driving on the right hand side of the road again. No problem it seems, it’s as though I have a switch in my brain and the transition to driving on the right is almost seamless, it feels perfectly natural, ditto the stick shift. Not ditto the Namibian drivers. I soon discover that the taxi driver is not an aberration, Namibians are a nation of god awful, super dangerous, terrible drivers. I swear I have never seen anything so bad, and I have driven in Greece before.

The chalet and Polo Vivo 1.4. 

 Mouse Birds in Windhoek

Arebbusch Travel Lodge

I head towards the city centre to buy some essential provisions, such as water and liquor, it is Christmas Eve, and we will be on the road most of the day, driving to Walvis Bay. I notice that there are not many motorcycles about, actually that’s an understatement, I realize that I have actually not seen a single one, not even a Vespa. I guess that anyone brave enough to ride a motorcycle around here will likely not have a long life expectancy. All motorcycle riders know that a large percentage of motorists are assholes when it comes to us, we have got used to riding defensively, but with these guys, I have no idea how I would manage. In the few miles I have driven here I have witnessed the following:

• ·         Without signalling, a car did a U-turn across four lanes of busy traffic, two coming and two going. When the driver saw me looking at him with what must have been an incredulous, jaw-dropped expression on my face, he shrugged and laughed in a slightly embarrassed way.
• ·         At least three cases of overtaking on a blind curve, crossing double lines.
• ·         A fancy Mercedes driven by a young guy with no shirt on doing no less than 130 Km/h in a 60 zone.
• ·         Turning left from the go straight only lane, right in front on me causing me to slam on brakes and nearly requiring an underwear change. I realise that the insurance package that I took with the vehicle (the lightest on offer) was probably a serious mistake.
• ·         Everyone is in a wild rush, and the slightest delay between traffic lights (they call traffic lights ‘robots’ in this part of the world) turning green and pulling away earns you a hooting.

Once on foot inside the mall, however, a very different perception of Namibians is evident. This is a friendly place. The mall is as busy as hell, but there is a good-natured atmosphere, people chat while waiting very patiently in long lines to get through a check-out. It seems to be a relatively prosperous place, the shelves are bulging with stock and there is variety with no shortage of luxury items. The shoppers appear to be healthy and well dressed, indeed the only real difference between this mall and a mall in Toronto is that most of the people here are a shade of brown, and there are many shades of brown as Namibia has a very diverse indigenous population. I am amused to see that a bottle of Crown Royal Canadian rye whiskey sells for about two thirds of what I would pay for it in Canada. The shops are mostly the same shops that I am familiar with from South Africa, even the banks are the same high street banks. The Namibian dollar is pinned to the South African Rand at a one to one and it seems that South African Rands circulate as legal tender just as common as the Namibian Dollar notes.

Service is somewhat laidback, but on the whole fairly good, except for one instance that was so spectacularly bad that feel I must write about. We have a couple of hours to kill before we need to drive to the airport and fetch my sister who is flying in from Johannesburg to spend a week with us. We had spotted a Mugg and Bean coffee shop, which is a South African franchise that serves cold and hot beverages, light meals, cakes, sandwiches and so on, sort of a restaurant-cum-coffee shop. I was never a huge fan as I found that indigestion was often the result of eating there.  Nonetheless we decide to have an early light lunch before heading out to the airport, having already booked out of the lodge. Strike one, the maître d'hôtel type person leads us to a table and hands us menus and assures us that a wait person will be with us in a few minutes. This turns out to be 20 minutes. Strike two, during the wait I decided to visit the ‘washroom’ (to use the Canadian euphemism), the lights are not working which renders the facility so dark that I cannot not see my hand held an inch from my nose, only my cell phone illuminates the place enough to facilitate a pee into the appropriate receptacle. Strike three, I order a waffle with maple (flavoured) syrup and ice-cream, and my daughter orders a chicken wrap. The waffle arrives after 15 minutes with ice-cream, but no syrup, the waitress says that the syrup will be brought shortly. Forty-five minutes later the syrup arrives, by which time I had given up and eaten the waffle (which is not terribly good and the indigestion is already starting) with the melted ice-cream – still no chicken wrap for my daughter. Strike four, an hour after ordering the waitress comes to the table, opens a notebook, pages through it and announces that the chicken wraps are not available today and would we like something else instead?  We decline and request the bill. Strike five (there is a strike five?), the waitress brings a chicken salad to the table, announcing that instead of the wrap, the chef has prepared this dish for my daughter. She looks hurt when we refuse the offering and insisted on the bill. Strike six, the bill includes the chicken wrap and the chicken salad and charges me for the maple syrup as well as bacon to accompany the waffle, which I had not ordered nor received. Really, I don’t understand the aggrieved look on her face when I don’t leave a tip.

We arrive at the airport, me guzzling antacids and my daughter a bit on the hungry side, to meet my sister. It’s been nearly seven years since I have seen her, but she seems to have not changed, we’re older, none the wiser and thrilled to be together. This is destined to be a great holiday!