We had to get up “hideously” early to get to Cape Town International at 6am. The airport at Cape Town is a pretty big airport and nicely appointed but there were only 7 flights leaving all day. Odd.
One of the flights was ours to Windhoek in Namibia. Landing at Windhoek was an surreal experience because you fly over completely featureless scrub with absolutely no sign of human habitation or even roads. You get closer and closer to the scrub until…bing, there’s the runway and you land. The airport is about the size of, say, Inverness airport. It’s also strange that it’s about 45km from the city. Why put your airport that far away from the city when there’s 45km of featureless scrub which is closer to the city? Maybe the Windhoek town planners are planning for a massive expansion of Windhoek into the Tokyo of Africa…
We’re at the Olive Grove Guest House which is a rather trendy place on City Hill. Windhoek isn’t large but the really strange thing about it is that almost all of it that we’ve seen looks like southern California. Fabulous houses behind high walls topped by electrified fences. All the hills that surround Windhoek seem to be covered in these mansions. Who owns them? No idea. There’s a lot of money here for reasons which aren’t obvious. According to the excellent Wikipedia article on Namibia (gosh I love the Wikipedia) Namibia has one of the highest levels of income inequality in the world. Looks like all the wealth is in Windhoek and there are a lot of very very poor people everywhere else. Namibia only became independent from South Africa in 1990 and one presumes that there was some influence of the South African government on the development of the country. English, Afrikaans and German are the three languages that you see on every sign: a remnant of the German occupation in in the 19th century.
We walked into the center of town along streets called things like Promenadeweg, Johannes Strasse and Robert Mugabe Avenue: it’s a weird mix. Once again, it just felt like a very prosperous suburb of L.A. The center of Windhoek is also very prosperous and compared to Cape Town, the majority of people buying things in the fancy shops are black.
Kudu on the menu tonight and then we’re flying into the bush to Sossusvlei. Very unlikely to have Internet connection there so the postcards won’t arrive until we stop over for a couple of hours in Johannesburg.
Recent Comments