Windhoek is a drag, man

TWO days ago I took the 5 hour bus from Swakopmund to Windhoek, Namibia's Capital city. The country's largest city at 400,000, it may be the most boring place on Earth. I may just be saying that because it's Sunday and literally everything but this internet cafe is closed (and i'm the only one in here), but wow it's a sleepy town. It does have it's pluses - the weather is great. It's in the highlands at 1,600 feet, so the air is cool and probably the cleanest I've ever breathed. And it's safe. And i'm out of nice things to say...

The first day here, I arrived around 6 and ran into Batya from the tour at the bus stop, who was on her way back home. We said goodbye again, I got to the hostel, and called my friend Erling whom I met 5 or 6 weeks ago in Pretoria, S. Africa. He picked me up and we got a few bottles of Jack Daniels to celebrate his birthday (good timing for me, huh?) A few of his friends and cousins came over, all good people, and we BBQ'd until the wee hours of the morning. Although Erling is a local, he's not your average Namibian. At 31 he's working on his second PhD in tourism while teaching, and has been to more than 40 countries. Although not part of the elite (his family is middle class), he's clearly part of the country's intelligentsia, and is going to do some amazing things for Namibia. Regardless, it was nice to finally be in a non-white neighbourhood and hang out with a crowd in which I was the only white guy. Getting away from tourist bullshit is part of the reason I didn't continue on with the tour all the way to Victoria Falls, even though I was having a blast.

The next morning I woke up early in Erling's spare bedroom and after being dropped at the hostel to shower and change, I set out to do some sightseeing. I covered all the town's highlights before 3pm - Alte Fest, Windhoek's oldest surviving building, which houses the National Museum, the National Parliament buildings, which has a garden that far surpasses Queen's Park's, the Owela Museum (chock full of stuffed game animals and some other freaky, freaky shit... not to mention the museum was as dark as a funhouse...) and strolled up and down the main streets a bit. With nothing else left to do, I had a traditional Namibian Tex-Mex dinner and watched TV at the hostel all night. Da Vinci code... woo hoo!

I have to say, it's been one of the more bizarre hostel experiences I've had. There are very few young people staying there, and the ones that are look at me like I'm crazy when I talk to them. The diminuitive Japanese David Suzuki look-alike who was fixing his Dr. Seuss-esque bicycle in the hallway for 2 hours yesterday, and who slept in his clothes on top of his bed sheets from 7pm last night to 9am this morning is a pretty fair representation of the average guest. I was also intrigued by the 7 foot tall Sikh gentleman who snored all night... Wait, did I say snore? I'm not sure that's the correct terminology. It was something more akin to 'attempting to cause gravity to implode on itself through use of the nasal passage.' Seriously I've never heard a guy snore like this... I think he gave himself whiplash a few times. Then finally was the unspoken fued between myself and the 4 Spanish people that decided to have a lively debate behind me while I was finishing my movie. I didn't want to deal with them directly so I just kept putting up the TV volume (yes, literally up to full blast) until they got the message and left.

Tonight the people from the tour are passing through Windhoek, minus the few that left when I did, so I'll try to meet them for dinner. Tomorrow morning I'm going to attempt to catch a very early minibus taxi for the ~14 hour trip into Botswana, and hopefully make it all the way to Maun so I'm not stranded somewhere. May be out of contact for a week. Talk to you soon.