Day 0: Windhoek

Getting to Windhoek from the UK was a long 36 hour day. We caught a flight from Manchester and changed planes at Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, which is now the hub airport for destinations in central and southern Africa. We had a refuelling stop at Geneva too, but we weren’t able to get off the plane here. We were on an Airbus 787 which was about half full.

One of the first things you learn when you get to the airport is how the money works. There was one ATM – and it had a sign saying it only dispensed ZAR (South African Rand). Thinking this would be no good, we didn’t get money out here – but the Namibian dollar is pegged 1:1 to the rand, and you can spend South African money freely in Namibia (but not vice versa).

So instead I went to the Bureau de Change. Normally you would not touch these at an airport as you’ll get the worst rates – but I noticed that there was very little difference between the buy and sell rates – in this case they bought £1 for N$23.2 and sold for N$23.8. The small gap tells you that you’re not actually getting a terrible deal, so I changed up some cash there. This was an overwhelming feature of being in Namibia – even as a tourist, you didn’t really feel like you were getting ripped off anywhere.

It’s a good idea to carry cash everywhere, but you can use contactless credit cards pretty much everywhere in the whole country, so I did use my phone most of the time, with a “perfect rate” credit card, the Santander Zero card.

We had some comfortable accommodation, the Elegant Guesthouse, about 20 minutes walk from the town centre. After a couple of hours we got a taxi who took us to Christuskirche, a very photogenic church which acts as the main landmark in the city, even though it’s not quite in the centre. From there we walked into what we thought was the middle of town.

We were advised not to walk around Windhoek but I think this is more likely because you’ll get bothered rather than it being dangerous. And yes, people did come up to us and ask to talk about football etc, and invariably they’d have some imaginary project they’re collecting donations for too. Like I said, it was a bother rather than a danger.

I did like Windhoek and I didn’t like Windhoek at the same time. There didn’t seem to be a real focal point of where to go once we left Christuskirche. We walked through a business district and then along a main road until we found a small bar, The Wolfshack, which made up part of a food court. This was definitely a “locals” area but it didn’t feel particularly unsafe to us. There were a lot of people watching a World Cup qualifier live – Angola v Cape Verde Islands – which Cape Verde won 2-1. Judging by reactions, we think the bar was full of Angolan supporters.

We actually had two nights in Windhoek – one at the beginning of the jaunt, and one at the end. Our second guesthouse was the Olive Grove guesthouse where we had a massive three-room space and a view of the mountains. Again we only had one evening in town so we decided just to find a restaurant, and we did find one 10 minutes’ walk away – an open air Italian place called Goodfellas, which felt like it could have been in Italy or Greece or Spain or anywhere but not Africa!