Getting into Windhoek

After the morning's refreshment stop, which took around 45min, we continued the journey towards Windhoek. The scenery was quite interesting and changing rapidly as we were moving ever closer to the country's capital.

Every now and then we drove through an unexpected thunderstorm, with flash rain and lightning bolts. They usually lasted less than five minutes, but appeared around every 30-60min. This was quite confusing as we were told, and could see, that Namibia was mostly desertic. So why the rain? And why did people warn us of incessant heat with 38-40 degrees at this time of year?

Well, it was quite hot whenever we left the bus, and during the ride the AC was increasingly struggling to keep up the good work it had been doing so far. As a consequence, people in the front rows were shivering from the cold and us in the back of the bus were sweating from the heat. The system didn't fail, it simply didn't work well anymore. The air also got stuffer by the hour. However, I decided to sleep some more and managed to successfully ignore most of the inconveniences.

Finally, with around three hours delay, we pulled into the bus terminal (it was more like a labeled shed where we arrived) of Windhoek. Thanks to my new friends, the bus drivers, our little group of three managed to snag a taxi earlier than the native Namibians, hehe. When we arrived at the address of our rented apartment we were initially a bit shocked, because it was located in a tower that's 13 stories high on the 8th floor.

The apartment turned out to be nice, but unfortunately there were some things where the hosts didn't prepare well for our arrival. Among other things, the Wi-Fi didn't work because it wasn't paid for! This was a massive inconvenience since we had just been offline for 26h and really needed to get connected in order to catch up on several things. Anne had even missed multiple calls already that were scheduled in the early afternoon.

The landlady couldn't do anything on short notice, so I went out to search for a prepaid SIM card. After an unbelievable hunt across three malls and fourteen individual stores, I finally found one that had a single SIM card in stock. All others were sold out. And the SIM I found only works in the cities...

It turned out that a lot of local crime/scams were committed using unregistered prepaid phones. In order to curb this particular type of crime the government put a blanket block on all prepaid SIM cards in circulation, no matter of activated or not, due at the beginning of this year. Many stores were therefore unable to sell any SIM, and those that could had huge queues in order to be seen.

I had finally found one and brought it home after two hours of searching. To our disappointment, we had essentially no signal in most of the apartment. After some trial and error I found out that the connection was most stable when I place the phone on a chair next to the kitchen cupboard for a little while. This trick allowed us to reach out to our respective families and check in with them to say that we made the trip safely.

We decided to eat some of the leftover sandwiches from the bus trip for dinner, enjoyed a wonderful sunset from our window, and crashed into bed at some point around 9pm. The situation also really made us realize how dependent we are on the internet to keep up both our travel patterns and work flows. And I feel like it really spurred us on to reflect on the potential that we will be offline for much more time than that whole in Namibia.Read more