Namibia: "If you need an emergency toilet...hey man it's Africa! Go behind the bush"

Namibia was AMAZING, but it’s kind of hard to explain why. It was completely different from both Spain and Morocco. Before I got there, I expected to love my safari but feel kind of indifferent toward the country. I did have a really good time on the safari but it wasn’t 100% as amazing as I expected, but the country exceeded my expectations by sooo much that it all balanced out. When we first got to the port, a group of young girls that we assumed were in a choir were standing on the dock singing and dancing for us so that was really cool. Once we got off the ship, my friend Sarah and I went to ask some of the adults that were with the children exactly what the organization did. They told us that they ran an after-school program that gave the kids a place to go since school lets out at 1:00. They said some students come every day and others come once a week or once a month or just whenever they feel like it. Then they told us that most of the kids they had brought with them were orphans, especially due to AIDS. They aren’t even really a choir; they just wanted the experience of coming to the ship. That was really depressing and I had a crazy amount of respect for what these people were doing. It was really interesting to me to think about the fact that going to our ship probably made these kids’ month, but all we ever want to do is get OFF the ship. After we talked to those people for a little while, we found the bus/van weird vehicles that were taking us to our safari. We got going for the safari and stopped at a town about 20 mins away from the port city called Swakopmund. It surprised me because it reminded me of a beach town and that’s not what I expected in Africa. The weather was sooo nice out and I really liked it there. We were in kind of a rush to find a place to get Namibian money and to eat and we saw a KFC so we figured since we didn’t know what we were going to be eating on a 3 day safari and since we’re soooo sick of the food on the ship, we should jump on something that we recognized. Some of the people in our group were 10 or 15 minutes late to meet back up and Nicky tried to apologize to the guide for some of the group being late and holding him up and the guide said “I guess they’re really Africans now,” which I thought was hilarious. We got back on the bus not realizing that we were in for the most annoying bus ride EVER. Someone from the company had originally said that the ride took a little over 4 hours, so with stops and everything I was expecting about 5. Between all the stops for gas and bathrooms and snacks plus the fact that one of the safari vans broke down on the way and we had to stop for 20 or 30 mins to help them plus the fact that it started raining on the way it took between 8 and 9 hours. I would have been fine with a 9 hour bus ride if I had been expecting it, but none of us had any idea it would take that long, so it pretty much sucked. The one cool thing about it was we saw pretty much every kind of African landscape on the way. A little bit out of the port city we drove through the sand dunes on one side and beaches on the other. After that it was still pretty barren but there were some small bushes and stuff on the brown ground. Eventually it looked like a green savannah-type landscape that we would be in for our safari. When we got to the camp site it was raining pretty hard and we had to set up our tents before eating dinner, which by the way ended up not being until 11:00 at night so I was STARVING. Looking back on it now it was a really funny experience but after an unexpected 9 hour bus ride, no one was laughing. Dinner tasted sooo good so at least we didn’t wait until 11pm for nothing but soon after we finished eating I went to sleep in my tent because I was exhausted. The next morning we got up early and they gave us coffee and hot chocolate to “wet our lungs” and we went on a 2 hour safari drive before breakfast since we didn’t get to do any the night before because of the weather. I finally was seeing the area we were in (Etosha) in the daylight and it was beautiful. Everything I saw in Namibia seemed so untouched. I really can’t describe why I liked it so much but I loved it. We saw some animals on the morning drive, mostly springbok and zebra, and then went back to our campsite for breakfast. After breakfast we went on a longer game drive. Something I liked about the way the safari was set up was even though there were about 130 people doing it, there were only 14 people in each van and each van had a guide and an assistant. The guides pretty much did their own thing when it came to where we were going and when we were going there, so it wasn’t like all 9 vans were following each other around the whole day. When vans would pass each other, they would stop and tell each other what they had seen and where they had seen it so that everyone could hopefully see as many animals as possible. I didn’t know that this is the rainy season in Namibia which is a bad season for safaris. Apparently since water is plentiful, animals don’t go to specific water holes and easy-to-see places like they do in the dry season. So, since we were already at a disadvantage because of the time of year, our guides wanted to make sure we got as much out of our time as possible. We saw a TON of zebra and giraffe and a bunch of other random animals and, thanks to some guide telling us where to go, we also saw 2 female lions. They had recently killed a zebra which was mutilated about 10 feet away from them which was really gross but really cool. We went back for lunch around 2 and then tried to go on another game drive but we were seeing pretty much the same stuff we had seen all day so we cut it short so everyone could just relax and stuff. That night the guides grilled a bunch of food which was AMAZING. It was one of the best meals I’ve had all semester (minus in Spain). There was also a watering hole close to our tents so we went down there and saw an African sunset which was really pretty. That night everyone just kind of hung out around the campgrounds and drank and relaxed. There was a bar/restaurant on the site that some people went to, but me Nicky and our friend Sarah had bought stuff to drink earlier so we took it to the watering hole and hung out there hoping to see animals (which we didn’t) and some other people from our trip came later and hung out with us too so it was a good time. Even our guides hung out. One girl said something I thought was really interesting. She said that in every country she asks someone from the country what they think of when they think of an American, like what type of person they expect. She asked our guide because he was from Namibia. So far her answers have been:
Spain: loud obnoxious drunks
Morocco: disrespectful
Namibia: they’ll sue you in a second
After our guide said that he went on to say that all of the guides doing our trip had been saying we were the coolest Americans they had ever met. I thought he might have just been a little drunk but the next day before we left he said it again and said “most Americans are shitty people, but you guys are the best.” The next morning we woke up wayyyy too early at 5something and got ready to go so that we could get back to Walvis Bay at a decent time. This trip only took about 7 hours instead of 9 since no buses broke down, it didn’t rain, and we spent way less time at the rest stops. My friend Nicole and I peed on the ground at one rest stop instead of using the bathroom. (The title of this blog is something our guide told us on the first day.) We stopped at Swakopmund for about an hour on the way back which was a nice break from the bus.
It’s hard to explain why I liked Namibia so much since the majority of my trip was spent in the bus, but I loved it and I would definitely go back. The safari was a lot of fun even though we definitely didn’t see as many animals as I would have liked to, but the country was beautiful and, although I didn’t get to interact with that many people, the ones I did interact with were really nice. Just like in Morocco, I noticed people in Namibia can be very intelligent but in a different way than a typical American would be considered intelligent. My guides in Morocco and Namibia both spoke 6 or 7 languages, which to me is amazing, but in their own country one of the “best” jobs they’ll ever get is as a tour guide. It’s always surprised me that the American education system doesn’t value teaching a 2^nd language as much as it should; you don’t start taking foreign languages until you’re 12 years old which is the same age that brain development slows down and it becomes harder to learn completely new things. But, even though this has always surprised me, I never realized HOW behind we were in all of it until I came to Africa.
I had a really good time in Morocco but I probably wouldn’t go out of my way to go there, but I would definitely come back to Namibia.