A night at the Wimpy

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Heading south in Namibia turns out to be another bewilderingly difficult southern African journey. I want to hit Keetmanshoop in order to then head west to Luderitz, an uber-German town on the Atlantic coast, but the bus leaves Windhoek in the evening hence will arrive in Keetmanshoop just after midnight, and the train arrives there at a more reasonable 5AM but takes twice as long. I opt for the bus.

The company is Intercape Mainliner, whose name always puts me in mind of drugs. The bus is a double-decker and pulls a trailer, similar to Intercape vehicles I've seen as afar afield from here as Maputo. The comfort level is decent, aided by the fact that it's only half-full.

However it turns out that Intercape has a sinister side that I've never seen mentioned before. The TV screens flicker to life and a man's voice intones some earnest prayers wishing for a safe journey for us all. This is followed by a dismal movie called "The Climb". My initial hope is that it will be a dramatisation of Anatoli Boukreev's book of the same name - his version of the events that Jon Krakauer covered so brilliantly in "Into Thin Air" - but it's an insultingly simplistic tale of how if you're an asshole, and as part of your assholiness knock up your girlfriend then reject her, then have your climbing partner die in order to save your life, that will turn you to God and cause the people in your life who you've hurt to rejoice in God's forgiveness for you. Finally there's a quick run through the Ten Commandments then mercifully the screens go blank.

We trundle through the darkness, settlements few and far between in this country where the population density is less than three people per square kilometre. The sky is thick with stars and once more my mind strays to memories of Australian Greyhounding.

We reach Keetmanshoop shortly after midnight and park at a filling station. It's a scheduled rest stop and another Intercape bus pulls in soon after mine. To my great surprise, it contains the two Singaporeans last seen in Wadi Halfa in Sudan back in March. They've taken pretty much the same route as me through the continent and summarise their trip with the same qualifiers as I do. This time we remember to swap e-mails.

To my consternation, this drop-off point isn't in Keetmanshoop proper - the centre of town, i.e. where the hotels are, is at least 5km distant and at this time of night there are no taxis around.

Which is why I spend the night in the Wimpy. Sleeping in the Wimpy is a popular activity for the staff from the other parts of the service station, so I don't need to worry about making the place look untidy. The hours creep by, sleep doesn't come easily, and the appearance of the morning's first rays of sun is as good a reason as any to head to the washroom to freshen up.

On returning from the washroom, the Wimpy manageress declares that she's found a taxi for me. He takes me into the town centre and leaves me at another filling station from where Luderitz-bound transport apparently departs.

Nearly four hours later, I catch a break. A grocery van has some passenger space so I jump in. The road is good, the driver fast. Gemsbok and ostriches look up curiously as we zoom through the hills and desert of the Namib-Naukluft Park, the same park I entered in Sossusvlei 300km north. We pass Kolmanskop, a ghost town that experienced both the boom and the bust of a diamond rush in the early part of the 20th century. And then, ahead of us, the gleaming waters of the Atlantic Ocean. (I've blogged Luderitz separately.)

On returning from Luderitz, it's another twelve hours before my bus leaves for South Africa so I take a room at a B&B. The owners later give me a lift to the Wimpy just before midnight. There, I meet the sole other male occupant of the minivan from Luderitz. He's also heading south, though to Cape Town not Upington, and has spent the day bored at the service station. He's a tuna fisherman, and is about to finalise the purchase of a boat so that he can skipper his own vessel. Apparently a season of tuna fishing can bring in catch worth R9 million, with wages, fuel and maintenance only costing R2 million, so there's good money to be made. After thirty years of working for others, he's soon to create his own future.

The Intercape arrives on time but is significantly fuller than before. I'm shown to a downstairs seat and then we're off - next stop, South Africa.

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