Leaving today

The bus is coming in an hour to pick me up to take me to the airport and I have been busy getting my blog up to date. This is my last entry before I arrive home tomorrow lunch time (Friday 8^th) and I am looking forward to a relaxing and tranquil weekend catching up with people and if the weather holds, sitting in my garden.

This part of the blog is really just the start of a longer and more extensive NeverTooLate theme and so I hope if you’ve enjoyed it you will continue to read. Pass on the link to your family and friends and anyone else you think might be interested. I’m always looking for NeverTooLate ideas so if there is something you’ve always wished you’d done then tell me and I’ll try it out and let you know if it’s worth the time, the effort and the money. In the meantime, adieu.

Final 24

Back at the Chameleon Guesthouse on Wednesday afternoon I find myself in a room called Kudu and I have my first double bed of the holiday. An image of Langkwai is still sitting gently at the back of my mind and I decide that I am not going to do any writing today but instead am going to lounge in the sunshine, read a novel and just chill. I’m tired after the journey and a slightly disturbed night so decide to stretch out on the bed for a minute or so but find myself drifting off into sleep. When I wake up its 5 o’clock and the sun has gone down but I feel perky and refreshed and stand under the shower keeping to the five minute rule this time, because I don’t feel quite so grumpy as last time. I dress in something vaguely clean trying not to disturb my packing too much because I can’t believe I’ve actually fitted everything into my suitcase and that it still closes. I wander to the bar and then into the TV lounge where the plasma is showing Mutiny on the Bounty. There are beaches, palm trees, crystal clear seas and coconut shells full of something I’m sure must be Mai Tais. If I’m not mistaken a handsome young waiter can just be glimpsed in the background distributing cold towels, with a smile, to the crew. I put Tahiti on my list. I’ve booked a cab to take me to Luigi and the Fish, a restaurant in town only about 5 minutes drive away. I’ve been there a couple of times before and know how to get there from the Chameleon so I am surprised when the taxi driver turns the opposite way out of the road. I give him the benefit of the doubt but we start to speed off to the other end of town and I know we are going in the wrong direction. He pulls up in a dark lay-by outside a closed restaurant called La Marmite. I tell him this is the wrong one and he says this is where I said I wanted to be brought which I know I didn’t, so I repeat again, ‘Luigi and the Fish’. He swings the car around and takes us at speed through a series of dark back streets and I am just deciding that at the next traffic lights I am going to get out of the car when we pass a sign saying Klein Windhoek and I start to recognise where we are. When I get out of the car outside Luigi’s I give him a hundred dollar note and he tells me he doesn’t have change for the fare which is fifty. He tells me to pay him both fares on the way back but I don’t intend to get back in his cab again so I ask him to wait and I go into the restaurant and get them to break the hundred. I tear up the card he has given me with his number on. The meal at Luigis is bad. I’ve chosen Schnitzel because it is down on the menu as a speciality but when it arrives (too quickly) it is rubbery and tasteless. The waitress asks if everything is alright and I tell her the schnitzel is rubbery and tasteless and she says oh dear. When she clears my plate which is almost intact and presents my bill she asks if I’d like a doggy bag so I know she is working on autopilot. They call me a cab and when I get outside I find the same guy waiting for me.

Back at the hostel bar I sit drinking a Windhoek Lager and watching Happy Feet on the overhead TV. At ten o’clock this is turned off mid film and so I make my way to bed. It is my last ever night in Windhoek.

Leaving Swakop

The bus left at 07:30 and the driver found me sitting on the curb, bags packed and ready to go. We did the usual pickup from various hotels and guest houses and as the mini bus trundled around the quiet and empty streets I noticed all the shops which I’d have liked to have ambled around if I’d had the chance. There was Big Daddy’s Fashions for Women, Speedy Sports and my personal favourite The Deep Chic Boutique. The mini bus over flowed with towering and stocky Germans and I found myself back in the same seat squeezed tightly up against the window. This time, however, I was keeping a very firm grip on my purse. As we drove through the outskirts of the town, through the industrial estate and out into scrappy desert I thought about the last five weeks and decided it had been probably the most unfulfilling and disappointing holiday I have ever had. What I needed, I decided, was a holiday to get over my holiday. Deciding where I was going to go was as good a use of my time over the next few hours as anything. Warming to this new purpose I produced a map of the world in my head and diligently erased the African sub-continent. After this trip I had no intention of ever renewing my acquaintance with Africa again. Africa and I were done. Finito. My new edited version of the world made me feel remarkably better and still left me oodles of choice. More than I knew what to do with. But I decided my baseline criteria was clear - I wanted beach, palm trees and sunsets as standard and Mai Tais on tap, preferably delivered to my recliner along with chilled towels and a smile by a young and handsome waiter who didn’t look as if he was going to mug me. I wanted a bed you could lie in sideways and still not touch the edges if that was what took my fancy and I wanted breakfast cooked by someone else and served until midday with 27 different ways to have waffle. Langkwai sprung to mind or Mauritus or perhaps the Seychelles. Wherever it was I intended it to be a long, long way from Africa.

I think I've been legally mugged

Even though the girl at the Bureau du Change had told me to come back just before they closed at three thirty to check the money was in, it was just too much to expect me to wait that long and while I sat in Café Anton writing it felt like I was six again and had been told by my parents not to go down stairs on Christmas morning until at least 8 o’clock just to make sure Santa had been. I am a little more patient now but at 1.30 the anticipations had just gotten toooo much and I packed up my laptop, finished the last of my goulash soup (I’d splashed out on lunch) and headed for Standard Bank. There was a small queue at the till I headed for but only two or three people and I happily tagged myself onto the end of it feeling sorry for all those in the other queues that stretched right back in a long snake across the banking hall. Just give it a few minutes I thought and I’ll be back out in the sunshine, sauntering along the beach holding the kind of ice-cream sundae that was so big it would likely win some international architectural prize. I allowed myself a little smile. The queue went down and soon I was sitting, facing the window, reference number and passport in hand. The girl checked the computer, smiled broadly, and said, indeed, the money was in. What was the feeling like? Well imagine ten years of Christmases and birthdays all rolled into one and that would be pretty much right. The feeling was pretty damn good. While the teller was filling out the Moneygram form I was wondering whether I might just manage to get one of the last seats on a late afternoon scenic flight up the Skeleton coast and just as I was thinking about it, right at that moment, all the power in the bank went off and that meant so did the computer screen with the confirmation number she needed before she could give me the money. Yes, it really did. Is there some BIG MESSAGE for me here I’m just not getting? Whenever on this holiday I’ve thought about fun and exciting things to do my world seems to fall apart. I’m starting to feel like a bit part actor in a remake of ‘The Day the World Stood Still’. Well, the lack of power didn’t stop anyone else getting their money apparently, so she asked me to step aside while she dealt with the simpler transactions that didn’t need the computer and when the power came back on she assured me the final few steps would only take moments to complete. It was now 13.45. People came and went, I leaned against the wall, sat down, then went for a walk to the other end of the banking hall, looked out of the window – you get the picture - then, at last, the power came back on. She gestured for me to sit, and smiling, filled in the rest of the form and said she just had to get it signed. Speaking to someone through what looked like a letter box in the wall behind her she disappeared and then didn’t come back for what seemed like a very long time and when she did come back she wasn’t smiling any more. The amount I had been wired was too big I was told (good grief, we’re talking hundreds not thousands here) and it needed special sign-off. The manager who needed to give the special sign off was in Windhoek and they were trying to get hold of him. They were “doing everything they could”. This kind of phrase, when used by a bank always rings warning bells and my recent experiences had not exactly built up my confidence in their competency. Time ticked on. The security guard closed and locked the door at 3.30 and the fifty of so customers still remaining in the banking hall went down to twenty, and then to eight, and then to four and in the end there was just me, leaning against the wall starting to get a bit vexed. Actually, that’s a bit of an understatement. The teller was studiously avoiding my eye by this time so I went and sat down, square in front of her and knocked on the window until she looked up at me. I reminded her I had been there for nearly three hours, I had been broke for five days, I was leaving on the bus at 07:00 the next morning and I needed that money. If necessary I was fully prepared to tie myself to something or wrap myself around the chair but whatever happened, I was not leaving that bank without my money, no siree.

She disappeared again and this time I saw her on the other side of the letter box gesticulating wildly and conversing with some urgency with a person or people just out of my view. I saw a flurry of activity and a waving of papers and then she was back in front of me smiling again and telling me the release confirmation had just come through. She passed me the printout with the payment details converted into Namibian dollars and I was also smiling at this point and was until I looked down at the currency conversion rate. Somewhere between converting from Sterling into Dollars (all Moneygrams are in dollars) and then to Namibian dollars I had lost eighty pounds not counting the fee for doing the transfer. I’d been here since 1.30, it was now 4.15, the security guard was loitering in my vicinity and they were offering me the money at a rate that made me understand why bankers get to retire at 45. Because they rip off people like me. My choices were 1. to take the money or 2. not take the money and ring up and query it with their international division. I took the money and made a promise never ever, ever, to come back to Namibia.

Back on the street at 4.30 in the afternoon my enthusiasm for souvenir shopping has waned as has my lust for an ice-cream sundae so I know I am in a bad way. The money was presented in hundred dollar notes and not having a handbag I’ve had to push the wad down deep into the pocket of my shorts and I’m now walking around the shopping district in Swakop looking like a lady boy. I dawdle, looking in the shop windows not really seeing anything to enthuse me and decide that I’ll go down and look at the street market below the hotel instead. I go to see Bluey first. His stall is at the bottom of the steps and every time I have walked past it he has invited me to take a look. Every time I have explained in turn that I don’t have any money, I really don’t have any money. But I’d promised him that if I got some I would come and look at his stall first and so that’s what I do and I spend a few minutes looking at the bangles he hands me and the carved masks and the bowls but there’s really nothing that I like enough to buy. eHHe’s offered me ‘sunset prices’ and is obviously disappointed there’s nothing that I want but he takes it in good humour and wishes me a nice evening as I walk towards Palm Beach for the sunset and my date with a Mai Tai. I get to the Lighthouse Restaurant just as the sun is setting and I sit at the bar watching the huge orange red ball slowly dip into the sea. The waves curl around the mole and then crash onto the beach and the fronds of the palm trees are swaying gently in the breeze. There is enough light to enjoy the beautiful scene for a few minutes before the sun finally drops beneath the curve of the horizon and as it does so I raise my glass to Sandy and Phil. And then I have an Oryx steak and chips and it’s the best meal of my holiday.

What a difference a day makes

I was at the bank by nine oh three and already the queues were eye-wateringly long at every till and every information point. It is clear that this is the norm because there is a large and permanent stand by the tills with a plasma showing an international football match. Some of the customers I reckoned were likely to see the game from start to finish and in fact some of them looked so weary I wondered if they were still queuing from Friday. As I hastened in myself, I nearly tripped over a free standing sign by the entrance to the bank. This sign told me that the Moneygram service was THE proven way to transfer and collect international money immediately. This sign had not been there on Friday. And why had the rep at Neb Bank, any of my banks in the UK or anyone in Swakop that I spoken to about the problem not told me that it could be so easily rectified? No, it took two people in a city 5000 miles away with no connection with the international banking system (well, as far as I am aware) to solve in minutes a problem that meta-organisations said couldn’t be solved at all. I ask you. The girl at Standard Bank told me that indeed if money was transferred in the morning then usually it was received before closing on the same day. This meant by 3.30 pm this afternoon I was likely to be a whole lot richer. Not in time to do any activities here in Swakop but more than enough to give me a trot around the shops for a couple of souvenirs, a couple of nice dinners and my train fare back home from the airport. No hitching for me. So dear readers, I leave you at this moment to head to the bank to see if the cash is in. If it is, you may well hear my whoop of delight echoing across the distance between us. I will resume my blog in the morning in the fuddle, I expect, of a very large hangover.