Day 3-050
8 hrs, 4 .5 kms

It's the middle of the night when we cross into Namibia, at a lonely desert outpost. I'm looking forward to experiencing my 3rd African country in less than a week. But the bus is stop and go all the way until we reach a gas station, and the driver tells us he's going to have to take it for repairs.

I suppose I could sit around and whine at all the time being wasted, or...

Why not just start the adventure right here? So I chase the bus down to the mechanic shop, take my luggage and tell the driver that if the bus gets fixed before I return, they can just leave without me.

And so my exploration of Mariantel begins.

I kind of had the idea that Namibia consists of just a couple of cities with endless wasteland in between. But no, there is life out here in this semi-desert, in fact even a bit of farming . A very different feel here to South Africa. Walking the wide, clean, empty streets (and feeing quite safe about it), past houses with no walls or electric fences just lawns around them... Past occasional modern hardware stores and mini-markets.

Somehow it reminds me of a middle-of-nowhere town in Arizona. Just a boring town with not much going on. Not complaining--on the contrary... after my near disaster in Vryburg, I'll take "boring" anytime. And the fact that I'm actually in Africa makes it more intriguing than boring... I wonder, why does this feel so different from the rest of Africa?

I notice more white people, as well as a lot of bi-racial folks. Some people are friendly, but I do get a couple of cold stares from the black folks. A very peaceful feel... but there are hints that there might be something going on beneath the surface.

I find a spot at the edge of town to do my parkbench concert, then head back to the gas station where, yes, my bus is gone, so I have a long wait for a minibus to fill up to take us to the next town up the road.

Here I get an earful of one of Southern Africa's clicking languages, which it seems every word has a click on a tongue pop in it. Quite fun to listen to. But I wonder, how do you SHOUT a clicking sound to someone a long ways away? You can only make a tongue click so loud...

As we continue up the road, once again I see vast fenced farms like in South Africa. It feels a little different here, as this is desert. I guess when someone comes, drills a well and farms in the middle of a very sparsely inhabited desert, it doesn't quite feel like they're "stealing" land.