Botswana/Namibia - 18 April, 2001

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Travel Distance

Total:

36,170 km

15,350 km

Today we head for Namibia.  It is another long driving day - we are up early and are ready to leave before 7 AM.  We get to the border just before 11 AM and as we cross the border we gain an hour as we put our clocks back.  Other then a short break for lunch on the side of the road, we drive all afternoon on our way to Windhoek - capital of Namibia.

We get to the town shortly after 3 PM and spend the next few hours going shopping and changing money.  This city is quite a contrast from the rest of Africa.  It is modern, clean and everything seems to work.  The other strange thing is how Germanic it is.  Many of the street names, building names and store names are all Germanic.  Many of the people are speaking German.  The foods and drinks are German.  At Lars' German comes in useful.

We head off to the campsite after a couple of hours in town, getting there around 5:30 PM.  We set up our tent in the small, grassy area they have (fortunatly most people get a room).  We then shower and get ready for a night on the town.  It is Jim's last day in the army and he is ready to celebrate his freedom.

We first go have a drink at a Portuguese restaurant, at which the rest of the group catches up to us.  We then head over to Joe's Beer House.  And this place is great.  It is huge and it is busy.  We get one big long table and sit down for dinner.  We get gemsbok and zebra.  The gemsbok is great, but the zebra is not as good.  We also drink lots of beer.

Just as we finish dinner, it starts to drizzle slightly.  We decide to go back to the hotel with some other people to secure our tent's fly.  We get two taxis and head off.  Our taxi driver will not tell us what the price is until we get there and we get into a big fight.  We finally agree on something and he takes us back to the beer house after we have secured our tent.

Once back at the beer house, things get a bit out of control.  After a few drinks, we move on to the sambuca.  The sambuca comes in all sorts of colors (red, blue, green, black and clear) and we light it on fire and drink it.  But before drinking it and while it is burning, we need to attach it to some body part, where it should then stick due to the vacuum created by the fire.  Things get a bit messy and out of control.  Details will have to be left out here on how bad things got.

When the restaurant closed at midnight, we grabbed a couple of cabs and headed out to one of the night clubs.  Not too much happened there as a couple of people where sick and we had to take care of them.  After a while, we headed back to the campsite, getting there around 2:30 in the morning.  What a night.