Neither A or B day –6pm, Monday, February 16, 2009. The ship is sounding it’s little horn thing and we about to head towards South Africa, where we’ll be docking day after tomorrow. I just got back on the ship about an hour ago. So much has happened in Namibia, I’m not even really sure to begin…I guess chronologically would be best so hopefully I don’t skip over anything. We got to Namibia Valentine’s day morning. I’d been feeling a little sick the night before, mostly just coughing, but I just curled up with a book and went to bed a little early hoping it’d pass by the time we had our logistical preport the next morning at 8. Well I woke up a little early to have breakfast with Monica, Rachel, Caroline (Caroline is in my Classical Islam class and her two best friends from Pitt. Are very cool. We all decided to do Namibia together since none of us had any big plans, just a few things we knew we wanted to do if we could) and Cassie. We went to the preport (didn’t start until 9:30 though. Oh SAS I love how unorganized you are…) Where an American Diplomat who specialized in security briefings from the Capital of Windhoek (pronounced VIND-hook; this country was colonized by the Germans after all, and is still spoken by much of the population) came and gave us a briefing about Namibia and how to stay safe. Mostly it was the usual stuff; be careful of crimes of opportunity: check out the atms and the people around them carefully before putting your card in, don’t flash money or credit cards, keep your purse close to you, watch your drinks, ect. Then he told us about how last time he came to Walvis Bay (vahl-fish bay; where we were docked) he spent the night in a bed and breakfast on the first floor. Around 2 or 3 am he heard a light scratching on his window, so he went and checked it out, pulling back the curtains of his room and there stood a mid-twenties guy with what looked like a knife raised above him. So the diplomat started yelling for the guy to back away from the window when the guy slammed the supposed knife into the window, shattering it, and lodging into the diplomat’s forearm. The diplomat picked up a wicker chair and started beating the guy with it while yelling and screaming, but nobody came. Eventually the guy sprung back out of the shattered window and ran away, and the diplomat was left alone in his hotel room, glass and wicker everywhere, and what turned out to be not a knife, but a screwdriver, lodged in his arm. He told us there was a lot of crime here in Namibia and that the security threat here was considered high (4/5 rating I think) by the US GOV. , but that our next port, Cape Town, had a safety rating of critical (5/5), and to be wary. The rest of the preport mostly had to do with the economic disparity of Namibia and the aids crisis here –on average, one in five of every person I met here in Namibia had HIV –and of the horrible effects of German colonization: something like 50% of Namibians were killed by Germans at one point during their struggle for occupancy. Overall though it sounded like a country with a lot of friendly people with a lot of national pride. Everyone kept saying Namibia was a young country –both because the country had only gained its independence since 1990 and also because something like 50% of the nation is under the age of 16. It’s a weird thing. After the preport they announced it’d also be a few hours before they’d cleared all our passports for immigration as Namibia had brought only one official and one stamp for everybody on the ship –thanks once more SAS! But that they’d also arranged for a childrens choir to greet us with traditional song and dance on the port. So we all swarmed to check that out and it was very, very cool. So the first day we all headed out immediately to Swakopmund, a cute little German town about 25 minutes away (only a 200 Namibian dollars, or $2 taxi fare too!) where there was a lot more going on. I loved it –we got an adorable cab driver who took us right into the edge of town along the coast. Swacop is a beachy little place where other Africans go for vacations I guess. We got dropped off a big pier where people were fishing, and walked along the beach for a bit. We ate at an awesome restaurant called “The Tug”that was right over the water. I had a huge beer off the local tap and the lamb curry –it was sooooo tasty, and could I just interject that I had no idea what I was missing when it came to international beer. Summer in Africa would have been significantly more difficult thing to bear had there been no refreshing beverage that was large (half a litre), cheap (for a dollar), safe to drink (beer is generally regarded to be safer than water in most places we’re visiting), and so cold it would numb my teeth. Thank God I like drinking beer now because I would have missed out on some seriously delicious, no astringency, foamy, fruity, light, beer. I will become a total beer snob once I get back to the US –never again will I be able to drink some shitty Coors or Natty light. Okay maybe that’s a lie, but I’ll complain significantly more.. So delicious lunch in check we walked along the beach a little more; then a guy came up to us asking if we’d like our portraits drawn. He said he was a struggling art student and that for two dollars he’d draw each of us. So we were all like, yeah, sounds awesome! Somehow I’ll find a way to post these photos soon. You can judge the (not-so) likeness of my mongoloid version self as soon as I can post-up (there’s a rumor on the ship that all of Mauritius is shore to shore wireless!!) So Rachel’s post-Neptune day baldheaded loveliness, as well as Monica’s fab. Egyptian-ness, annnnnd my face, are forever etched. The guy who did this also tried to chit chat with me while he was drawing, “So you look like the baby. You are very little and white. How old are you?”I told him to guess and he says, “I do not want to say too young…12? 15?”Seriously. Not cute. During lunch sometime we also heard about a great hostel from some of the smoker kids Amy was with called Dunes Backpackers right near the ocean, so we wandered over there and got rooms for 100 NAD, or $10, there were four beds in one room, and one bed in another with Amy and the rest of the smokers. I said I’d take the room with them since I knew them fairly well and had gone out with all of them in Spain and knew some of them from various classes. We booked an atv/quadbiking tour for the next day on the sand dunes in the Namib desert through a company called outback orange (www.outback-orange.com) and then went out around town. We went to a fair trade store where I bought one of the billions of carved makalani nuts (I think I’ll hang it on my car), a carved soapstone tortoise for my dad, a sticker for my waterbottle (one in every port so far, yesss!) and a porcupine needle for my hair. We had the most delicious soft serve with chocolate flake stick, checked out a crazy grocery store (tried pine nut soda –very strange!), and had late night French fries and more beer before going out to a couple bars and clubs, lots of drama ensued from there, but I’ll spare you the gory details. Needless to say, I got no sleep at all, and when we woke up at 7:30 to shower and have breakfast before the quadbiking people picked us up we were all exhausted –I’d also started to get a really disgusting bronchial sounding cough and feeling kind of terrible. Cassie’d lost her voice though, so I made out a little better I guess. We left our shiznizzle at the office (p.s. the manager was at the same club as us that night. Creeper), paid our $40 (for three hours, what a deal!) and hopped into the van to head out to the desert. After something like 50 seconds of safety instructions on how to use the quadbikes (faaaar more complicated than one might initially think) we were off. Me in the very front initially. They go so fast! It’s bizarre too, for the most part they felt like they gripped on to every grain of sand and the faster you went the more you just flew over the dunes, while other times the atvs felt like they were going to tip over at any second (this turned out to be a legitimate fear as I later found out one kid from sas had to go to the hospital because the atv flipped over on him. No wonder we were specifically told not to rest any type of motor vehicles while on the voyage, including ATVs), and if you didn’t go fast enough they’d get stuck in the sand, often on ridiculously steep dunes. The driver ahead of us said that dunes in general are 45 degrees on one side, and have 90 degree angles on the other so if you try to go over the wrong dune you could go air born off the other side. These really obnoxious guys were with us too who were so disgusting and rude –all typical frat boy misogamy and general rudeness. We were supposed to stay in a general straight line, but they kept cutting us off and not listening to the instructor; weaving in and out around the dunes and ignoring the safety signals our instructor gave even when there were sinkholes and snakes and stuff. It was just incredible though; I couldn’t imagine seeing the dunes any other way though. They were just so vast and gorgeous –I don’t think I’d ever really be able to describe them properly…Were we walking through them I probably would have wanted to kill myself considering how hot it gets out there with the heat and sun reflecting off of the dunes and minimal breezes. At one point towards the end we edged up one huge dune and on the other side you could see a vast expanse of bright ocean. Like a big painted swath of blue across the desert, it struck me how strange it was that it was like the beach beside the ocean just stretched out forever, never really turning to anything all that fertile. Which isn’t to say the Namib Desert wasn’t an ecosystem of its own. Things live and thrive in that desert that I never even knew about, including the people. We took it a lot slower that day, mostly because it was a lot hotter and Cassie and I were feeling a lot sicker. We tried to go to a brewery and the local aquarium without much luck and eventually came back to the ship for an early dinner (after more soft serve, of course.) I passed out around 5pm and didn’t wake up until 7am the next day. I still feel awful, but I can go a few minutes without hacking and am somewhat able to breathe now –everyone on this freaking ship is sick too; things spread ridiculously fast here, it’s a little crazy. Kids need to learn to wash their hands and stop breathing on one another, okay? So this morning after my 7am wake-up we decided to all head to the bank to pull out some more money but one of the girls we were travelling with had her card frozen. Even though most everyone called their bank ahead of time to let them know they’d be travelling out of the country, and to where, many of the people on the voyage seem to be having problems with frozen accounts and just general problems pulling out money… Then we headed out to dune 7, the largest dune in Walvis Bay, I really wanted to climb to the top, but like an idiot I’d worn flip flops today and the sand was just waaaay too hot and nearly burnt my feet through the soles. We also got a crazy-ass taxi driver who demanded we all pay double once we were halfway there; we decided in the end to just pay him what he wanted since it was stupid to quibble over dollars when we were in the middle of the desert and it was noon. We hung around and took some photos –OH! That reminds me, Cassie and I were messing around with the settings on my camera yesterday night and somehow managed to delete every single one of the photos and videos I’d taken. Oh well; I was only a little upset about it since I had some really awesome photos of atving and group shots of us all. But I figure I saw those things, I did those things, and even with my incredibly horrible memory, I can’t imagine forgetting much of this. Buuut I don’t particularly wanna risk it, so I’ll be stealing some of the ones Monica took; she has a much nicer camera than me anyways. After dune 7 we went to a restaurant by the boat called The Dock beside the lagoon. We ordered pizzas all around and they were so good. It’s not what you think either, pizza seems to be a favorite of Namibians, it’s all over the place…It was getting kind of late too and Cassie needed a Namibian flag and I wanted to use the last of my Namibian dollars since you can use S. African Rand and Namibian dollars interchangeably here, but in S. Africa they won’t accept NAD and you have to pay a fee to have NAD changed to Rand. So I bought lots of snacks including chutney puffs, lollipops, cough drops, lemon-lime shaving cream, wine gummies (Cassie bought those for me; they have all different kinds of wine flavors!) and mentos (apple, strawberry yoghurt, and cherry yoghurt flavored.) So now I am watching Pirates of the Caribbean and I am thinking I need to be a little less white in my future life. It seems I am forever burning, despite the multiple applications of sunscreen each day. I am always burnt and it is incredibly annoying. I’m over it. TANNING = NOT WORTH IT.
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