Bougainvillea and Barbed Wire


14 April, Ian

Tuesday night was our last in Botswana. We tried some maramba fruit, which look a little like plums when they come off the tree but more like lychees when peeled. They are a favourite of the elephants, who had evidently been foraging around a tree near our tents. Yesterday morning (Wednesday) we drove out of Morembi NP and to Maun airport for our flight to Namibia. I was disappointed not to have a chance to get a local to pronounce the name of our camp site: it's written Xakanaxa but this is a transliteration from a click language. Apparently, there are four separate click sounds that feature as phonemes in San and similar tongues.

After stopping for a picnic lunch under a camel thorn acacia we made it to the airport in plenty of time for our flight; unfortunately, they didn't open the check-in desk until shortly before we left. After we'd been there for a while, really for something to do, I fired up my mac to see if I could find a wifi signal. Surprisingly, one of the safari companies had an unprotected network. It had never really struck me that there would be opportunities for scamming free broadband access, but not I see why those keyring wifi finders may actually be useful. I had just managed to retrieve our email and fire off one reply when we had a potential problem: Paula told me that since we'd been at the airport we'd lost the wallet containing all our car and accommodation vouchers for the rest of the month. We couldn't find them and had to baord the plane without them, but just before the door closed a security guy ran up and handed us the package, which they'd evidently found somewhere.

The plane was pretty small: no hosties, no overhead bins, no loos, and with 8 passenger seats either side of the aisle and one in the middle at the back. I got the middle seat and can recommend it to anyone who is scared of flying. With the cockpit door open I had a clear view through the windscreen, which was great as we came into the land. The plane was getting buffeted about all over the place: for a lot of the time, even when we were about to land, the nose was pointing to the right of the direction of travel, and frequently it would tip up so that the runway was not in view. It was like watching someone without much co-ordination trying to land a plane with a joystick on a computer game. Somehow it was still strangely reassuring to see it from the pilot's viewpoint.

Windhoek is so different from where we've just come from. There are plenty of sleek modern houses, and as we drove in the town seemed to have a Californian air to it. However, it's not the houses that initially catch the eye but the incredible security around them: coils of barbed wire, electric fences, Alsatians, grids over every window. It seems so incongruous, a prison complex with Mediterranean chic. Indicating particularly severe mismatches of wealth I guess.

We spent last night in a guest house run by the car hire firm. To my great pleasure, this was in Schopenhaurstrasse. We ate at Joe's Beerhouse, a fun place themed around wild meat. (You could have zebra and the rest of it; I had Springbok and the others had steak and ribs.) To get there we drove along Bahnhofstrasse and then the road where the restaurant was: Robert Mugabe Avenue. We had driven across town from the Academy to the Eros district. Felt as if I was in Murakami novel.

This morning we collected our rental car. It's a Nissan Off Road, with lockable canopy and two roof tents and is the coolest thing. It reminds me having a James Bond DB7 or a Batman car as a boy, with all the special toys and tools. I've no idea how it drives but I already want one.

Now we're in Windhoek. No one has any idea what wireless internet access is so it looks as though this will be a couple of weeks out of date, and the previous ones more so. Oh well...

Posted: Thu - April 14, 2005 at 02:51 PM              

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