Namibia is beautiful; stark and desolate in the desert and desert highlands, and slow, laid-back, and lumbering along in it’s cities, which (sorry Namibians) feel like South Africa in the 80s - completely with older buildings, a lot more dust, and some interesting taste in hairstyles and clothes of the both the white and black population.

A country of Namibia’s size (about half the size of Alaska, larger than Texas, and four times the size of UK) with only 1.8M people always feels empty in a certain way. 

I have spent two weeks here, and with half of that nursing a sprained ankle (nope, still can’t run but can walk with barely noticeable limp), I have a major case of cabin-fever and want to get back on the road.

One thing that has struck me as interesting about Namibia and different than South Africa is the begging - here everyone has been taught the same line - "I am hungry, need to buy bread for my family, so hungry, give me five dollar," which I suspect is a legacy of the contrast between the poverty, the relative level of development and tourism in Namibia, and the hordes of white people from the West that come to Namibia to do volun-tourism and save the poor Africans - because surely, teaching English for a few weeks so that the kids have dozens of new teachers each year and encouraging permanent "substitute teacher syndrome" and giving money to panhandlers and further discouraging people to work is a great thing for Africa.

Anyways - if all goes well with motorcycle parts being flown in from Johannesburg (UPDATE:  They never arrived, so I had to do a little back-alley electrical work to hot-wire the cooling fan), by the time you’re reading this, I’ll be well ensconsced in the middle of Angola.