Swakopmund; Sunday, 13 April, 2003

2am saw a slightly more interesting experience, the plane suddenly, over the middle of the Sahara, hitting turbulence, or something similar, and then rapidly moving several hundred feet down in a very short amount of time!, 5:00 and as we fly over Swakopmund (only another 12 hours till I reach it!) breakfast/plastic is served.

Shortly before 6:30 (7:30 local time) and nearly 30 mins early we touch down in Cape Town and I take my first steps on African soil. After an hours wait to get through immigration (I was at the back of a plane and that was the 3rd 747 to come down in 10 mins so there were a lot of people) I emerged into the airport and went to see if I could check in for my connecting flight to Walvis Bay. With an infuriatingly long amount of time to wait until my next flight, but not long enough to risk leaving the airport and seeing the sights of Cape Town, I took a seat and proceeded to have a considerably more pleasant breakfast in the airport.

By 2pm my flight to Walvis was ready to board and for the second time that day I had to change my watch to remove the hour that I had added arriving in Cape Town. During the summer in the UK (winter in Namibia) the two countries are both on the same time zone (GMT+1) then when the clocks in the UK go back an hour at the end of summer, the clocks in Namibia go forward and hour as they start summer so for 6 months of the year the two countries are 2 hours apart. Confused yet? not as bad as when you have to keep changing your clock in the same day, by the time the plane left Cape Town (26 hours after leaving home) I was thoroughly confused on not only the time but the day as well!

The flight from Cape Town runs up the coast line all the way to Walvis. On one side of the plane is the desert on the other, the Atlantic it makes for a beautiful, if not slightly eerie landscape. The whole way we were battling against headwinds and approached Walvis 25 minutes late. We descended towards the airfield and then re-circled as the plane was buffeted by winds, we came back round, descended, got within a couple of hundred feet of the ground before sharply pulling back up again and recirlcling before another attempt. The pilot decided this time to come in high and then descended steeply just before the runway. To say that it was scary was an understatement and by the time we had stopped you could see the dents in every arm rest down the length of the plane where people had been gripping them!

My Sister and Brother-in-law met me at the airport and drove me back through the desert, through Walvis Bay (The second city of Namibia), back into the desert and on into Swakopmund. That evening, as was to be the case on most evenings, I was treated to a spectacular sunset over the Atlantic.