Southern Africa! Starting point: Windhoek

Probably nothing much comes to your mind when your hear the word Namibia… You may know it’s an African country and that Shiloh Jolie-Pitt was born there… Or maybe not even that if you are not a People magazine subscriber. So let me start with a brief introduction: Quite a “new” country, Namibia got it’s independence from South Africa in 1990. Since it is mostly desert, South Africa did not protest much and it was a peaceful process. It has a more or less stable political and economic situation, which explains why we have all heard more about little Rwanda than this  824,292 km2 country (twice the size of Germany). Even my mom had trouble remembering where I was going, I finally came up with a way for her to remember “Mom, if you see a worried look on the person’s face, you are saying the wrong country again”, she insisted in mortifying my friends and relatives by saying I was traveling to Nigeria.
Anyway, we arrived to Windhoek’s airport without expecting much. We’d read our travel guide and multiple internet articles and browsed through hundreds of pictures on line, but with countries so far away, the mystery remains until you are actually there.
We picked up the car we had rented and made our way to the Windhoek Country Club. A big hotel&casino with beautiful gardens that has certainly seen better days and should now be either renovated, or transferred to Reno where all the other great 1970’s ghost hotel&casinos reside.
We rested for a while and went for a tour around the city. It is definitely not what you imagine a capital city to be, no tall buildings (except for the new Hilton with a very pleasant roof top terrace and a couple more), no traffic jams, and, since it was Sunday, not many stores and restaurants that were opened. We parked at the main Church, a very German look like construction which was also closed, and walked down a little street towards the main street. I was distracted looking s at the trees or something when Chris enthusiastically pointed and muttered (trying not to be loud and obvious): “LOOK! The naked red women! It’s the naked red women!”. It took me a while to understand and realize what he was talking about. Since we were not traveling to Northern Namibia, we assumed we wouldn’t’t be lucky enough to see any of it’s emblematic people, but there they were, in the middle of Sunday deserted Windhoek, bare and red breasted, selling all kinds of beautiful crafts.
Now, Himba is a tribe that characterizes itself for its “red people”. The Himbas cover themselves entirely (including hair) with the Namibian red soil. This is how they clean themselves, they never bathe, and contrary to what you must be thinking, this method appears to be quite effective, I stood side by side to a couple of them for pictures and there wasn’t any smell. They were extremely nice with us, posed for pictures, made jokes, told us about their culture and even performed some songs and dances. It was really a unique lucky experience to encounter them so randomly. Lovely 19 years old Bonita (yep, that was her name) was the funniest one and the most excited about the curious two foreigners.

Realizing there wasn’t much to see, we made our way to Joe’s Beerhouse for dinner. Now let me tell you this (read on your most serious tone): If you are ever in Windhoek you HAVE to go to Joe‘s… in fact it may be worth to go to Windhoek, just to see this place. It totally deserves the first place on Tripadvisor’s things to do in Windhoek. I don’t even know how to start describing it…It’s like someone browsed for years through all the possible garage sales, buying whatever there was to buy, then bought a huge piece of land, built some sort of “palapas” and hung all the stuff he had accumulated wherever he could. It is sooo weird, and yet so fascinating. The moment we cross the door, we knew we were not up for our typical meal. Two minutes later our suspicions were confirmed by the menu, where else would you be able to indulge on zebra, crocodile, kudu, ostrich, springbok, antelope… of course was asked for all of the above, kudu being the absolute winner.

We came back to Windhoek some days later to catch our flight to Victoria Falls. We got to the airport only to find out that our plane had been re-scheduled and had already left. I believe this happened to us so that we wouldn’t forget that we were in Africa and things like this just… happen. Now, here is where I do the commercial publicity for African Gateway, the South African agency that organized the trip for us. Everything was taken care of in the most professional way. This was the only bump we encounter during the two weeks we were travelling and it was the airline’s fault (we later received a letter from the airline Air Namibia apologizing for the inconvenience.). Nevertheless, the agency solved it for us within minutes, we were booked into another flight the next day, had a hotel for the night, and they even re-scheduled the helicopter flight we had arranged in Victoria Falls (even though we hadn’t done this through them). It is not a pleasant feeling to such a last-minute change of plans, but we were not going to allow that to ruin our trip. We went for drinks at the Hilton rooftop terrace, witnessed a colourful sunset and stayed at a stunning five star guesthouse called Olive Grove in a residential area of Windhoek, truly a notch above the country club/ casino we first stayed in (We should have stayed there on the first place).
A weird restaurant and red naked ladies were Windhoek’s highlights, but we didn’t get over excited, we knew the best was yet to come…