Seeking connection

Now that we were in Namibia, we had a harder time staying connected. This was especially apparent because when we arrived at our accommodation after being offline for 26 hours on the bus, it turned out that the Wi-Fi at our new home was not working at all, and we couldn't even let our landlady know about it.

In South Africa, we were using both various traditional SIM cards, as well as new eSIMs. The latter didn't exist for Namibia after a solid amount of research, so I went to out to find some of the former.

In my research, I discovered that there are only two major mobile operators in the country. One of them focused on cities, the other on the more rural areas. Both sounded sort of insufficient for our purposes.

To make a very long story short, I ended up going to fourteen shops and had to enter three shopping malls until I finally managed to find ONE shop that had ONE SIM card in stock. Apparently there was a new regulatory law introduced because there was a lot of scamming that happened with burner phones.

So, the (very obvious... not!) consequence was that all of the anonymous and unregistered SIM cards were blocked and rendered useless - including the ones still unsold at the stores! That's the reason why finding a SIM card was so difficult.

I got the SIM, brought it home where I had two exited friends waiting to check in with their families, and discovered that in 80% of our apartment there was no signal 🤣 At least I managed to send a message out to our landlady saying that the Wi-Fi wasn't working.

Frustrated, and offline, we decided to call it an early night, which was a good call because we fell asleep like rocks in no time.Read more