Namibia Road Trip - Day 1 — Fernweh Frazon

Namibian Road Trip - Day 1. AKA the most ridiculously troublesome anything-that-could-go-wrong-will airport experience. My plane landed in Windhoek at 1:10 pm but we didn’t leave the airport until after 4.

Upon landing I carried my suitcase down the stairs and across the airfield to the airport where lines were forming for passport and visa checks. In Lisbon I had been told that as long as I had a way to confirm I was leaving the country within 30 days of entering I wouldn’t have a problem at customs and they checked me in for my flights out of Cape Town at that time. I had downloaded my rental car receipt that showed us driving out of Namibia even sooner than my Cape Town flight and thought I was well prepared.

In the customs area, there were lines of shelves along the outer wall but no forms to fill out, and none had been handed out on the plane, so I, and everyone else, headed to the appropriate line. After the first few people were sent back to the shelves to fill out the forms which were not there and numerous people yelled about the forms not being there the customs agents figured out what was going on. I exited the line with everyone else and immediately returned with my form to fill out in line while I waited, not at the shelves. This put me 10th or so in line.

Even still, I saw two people ahead of me detained. One was a German couple. I didn’t get all the details, she was speaking German after all, but she had opened something she wasn’t supposed to. The agent told her “you did not receive it like this. you did not receive it open. it has been tampered with.” and off she and her husband/boyfriend/partner/friend/traveling companion were whisked, her in tears, into a room with all tinted windows. The second was a father traveling with his family. All “adults” had to check in individually and his family was already through. The agent said she could not confirm that he was the person in the passport, because the person in the passport had a beard and he did not. He was not forced into the room but was taken to the side with a few officers to figure out if he was who he said he was.

When my turn came, I thought I was prepared: The form was filled out in all capital letters; I had downloaded my rental car and flight confirmation; I didn’t now or preciously have a beard. But no. I needed an address for where I was staying in Namibia. I explained I was road tripping and would be in different places almost every night. The itinerary I had made had links to all my hotels, but I hadn’t written out the addresses. As a Google Fi user, I have international data in 200 countries. Namibia is not one of them. The airport doesn’t have Wifi for its guests. I told her I was staying at Etosha Lodge and she said she needed an address while filing her nails as she had been doing the entire time I was scrambling to find the information. I eventually took to reasoning with her as I wasn’t going to magically remember the address of a lodge in a National Park while holding up now two international flights full of people. We settled on just the name of the lodge and I was free to go.

It was 2pm at this point, and our airport troubles were far from over. I was meeting two friends, Matt and Kristina, at the airport and I found them right away in the small lobby. We walked to Bidvest where we had scheduled a rental car but were greeted with bad news. After literally 20 minutes of line by line explanation of what was and wasn’t covered with our 10,000 Namibian Dollar (~700 USD) deposit and pre-purchased insurance, we learned our car was ready, but we could not add on a GPS, those had to be scheduled at the initial time of the rental. Much to the surprise of both my companions, this made me giddy instead of frantic. I had loved using a road atlas on my New York City road trip, and countless others, and always felt like I was more familiar with the trip afterward. Though the rental car company did not sell road maps, there was a vending machine in the airport that sold them for $10, less than 2 days of payment for GPS. The ATM gave us South African Rand but the map vending machine only took Namibian Dollars. Never fear! There are two Rand-Namibian exchange machines in the airport! Both were out of order. The single gift shop would not exchange with us, that was the point of the exchange machines, she said. Luckily, this was the moment to vindicate my unpreparedness with the customs agent. I had download all the Namibian maps onto my phone with Maps.me and had enough confidence in it (which proved to be well founded) to basically stake our trip on its accuracy and range.

We headed out the the rental car lot, thinking our troubles were over.

The car we were assigned was not in its assigned space, but we used the key fob to find it. After thoroughly photographing the scrapes and dings an agent from the rental car company came over to give us the run down. He took the keys, put them in the ignition and ….click. Nothing.

“Thats a huge problem” he said. He handed me the clipboard of all the day’s rentals, and walked away.

15 minutes later he returned with another vehicle and tried again, getting only a click, before jump starting the car. Bear in mind this is Namibia. Our trip had us driving almost 4000 miles, most of them on gravel roads. But our first stop was overnight just 20 km into town. We were discussing how to politely refuse to take the rental car when another rental car attendant came over.

“Obviously we can’t send you in this car” he said, to our immense relief. And he left to get another South African car we could take back across the border. It hadn’t even been washed yet. But it had an engine that worked and we were pleased.

However, now all our border crossing papers were wrong. In an attempt to cut back on time spent, the rental agent suggested “one of the girls” return to the airport to replace the papers while he showed the man about the car. After the horror of the first car not starting we decided it was a good idea to get a Namibian SIM and prepaid minutes in the event we had to take advantage of our car insurance. I ran back to the airport and reported to the inside agent what had happened. After apologizing profusely he filled out the new paperwork which I signed (Matt’s name is on the rental so I am hoping this doesn’t cause an issue at the border, TBD). I then went to buy phone minutes. There was a self service machine and a woman guarding it who told me I couldn’t use it as I was walking by. Inside was a line of 17 people. I returned outside the store and asked the woman if I could use the self service machine to buy minutes and she stood up happily to help me through the process. Fifty Namibian Dollars later, we had a voucher for data and calling. I returned to the car just in time to catch the end of the tutorial on changing a tire. When the agent held out the keys to Matt I took them and walked toward the driver’s side (right side). The agent let out a whoop “she’s driving ?!” he exclaimed, and I smiled.

It was now 3:56 pm and we were finally leaving the airport.

Or so we thought.

But as Matt tried the voucher we realized it required a SIM from the same service provider, which Matt didn’t have. Matt had said he’d gotten a SIM and I’d assumed it was the same. It wasn’t. We hadn’t even left the parking lot and we were already headed back to the airport.

We did eventually leave the airport, and after a few missed turned and closed roads found our way to our wonderfully inviting AirBnB. If we weren’t heading out the next day to go to a safari, it would have been hard to leave.