Mode of Transport: X Other: Footing

Stamp 1: Departing Namibia

After Nangolo read the exam results aloud to the maybe 100 learners that showed up on Friday, the last official day of Term 1, I hurried to my office to print out the final copies of the school’s once-termly report for the circuit and regional offices that I had been working on with my principal. Vilo leaned his head in the door and said goodbye for the holiday.

“Are you getting a ride to town with Ivan?” I asked expectantly.
“Yeah”
“Are you leaving now now? (in Namibia “now, now, now” means now; “now, now” means fairly soon, and “now” means anytime in the foreseeable future)” I asked, fearing an answer of “yes”.
“Yes”
“Ah, I was going to see if I could squeeze into his car”
“Well, I just spoke with him, and his car is full-up”

Oh well, I thought to myself, everyone is leaving today, there are a few other people that I will be able to ask for a ride. By this point in my Namibian career I had seen numerous Fridays, but I did not take into account that I had never yet seen an end of term Friday. After snatching the reports as soon as the printer ejected them, I stepped out of the office and saw…no one at all. When holidays come around, learners and teachers apparently just vanish.

Fortunately, the secretary, Meme Selma, and my principal were closing up the front office, and I was able to hop into the bed of the principal’s truck for a ride into my home away from home away from home, the nearest town to my school, Eenhana. After meeting my friend Julia in town for a brief, token fulfillment of our weekly ritual of sharing a plate of chips (aka french fries) I rushed to meet Kyle a few towns away. Kyle would be my fellow wanderer and tent-mate for the coming month on a journey for which we only had a rough idea of what we would be doing for the first five days although it would last four weeks.

Inventory check:
- Several books
- 2 Namibia & Botswana travel books
- 1 Mozambique travel book with map
- 1 otherwise fully functional tent with temperamental zipper
- 2 backpacks with socks, underwear, shirts, towel, etc: one for Kyle and one for myself
- 1 large black athletic bag holding pots, plates, rice, washing detergent, and other assorted necessities with a few tears recently repaired by the expert needle and thread of one of Kyle’s colleagues

After uniting with Kyle, his roommate escorted us to a portion of road that had a larger gravel area beside it than the other parts of the road and flagged down a bus. We successfully convinced the driver to allow us to hitch along at a fraction of the price that all the other passengers had paid and climbed aboard.

This ride took us to Tsumeb, a fairly large town, where we met Tina, another volunteer in the area for the night, and Kristen, who would be the third member of our party for the first week or so. Bright and early the next morning we rolled up our tent, packed our bags and hitched a ride with a mute Namibian referred to by his friend as “The Big Man” to the Northeast.

After contemplating the clouds whilst waiting in the town of Rundu for several hours due to our decisions to turn away ride offers that requested more money than we were willing to spend, we came to an agreement with the driver of a government vehicle heading farther Northeast to Katima Mulilo, a town near the border of Namibia and Botswana. The bakkie had an enclosed bed, but the bed was packed full with literally thousands of informational pamphlets that the government employees had been tasked with distributing throughout the regions. This meant that for the next five hours or so, Kyle, Kristen and I rotated so we all had equal time crouched in a ball at the back of the bed of the truck between the door and the stack of pamphlets or laying flat on top of the pile in the approximately 2 feet between the pamphlets and the roof of the truck-bed. While the driver of the car strictly stuck to imbibing coca-cola, his two friends up front were providing their livers with a steady supply of alcohol to process. This resulted in numerous hilarious, and I quote, “wee-wee” breaks, that inevitably morphed into roadside dance-breaks, and these occurred with increasing frequency as the kilometers and bottles accumulated, thankfully allowing us to stretch our limbs every now and again.

The morning after camping at a site beside the Zambezi River and all of its strange and wonderful noises, we watched the sun rise and caught a ride to the Namibia-Botswana border. I referred to my passport to record its number, filled out the rest of the form, and the three of us each paused at the question regarding mode of transport through the border. None of the options above applied to us, so we all chuckled as we checked the box for “other” and wrote on the space provided “footing”. Then we proceeded out of the office, past a boom gate, and into the no-man’s land between the two nations.