Tuesday was another bitingly cold day with the continuation of the icy easterly winds. We headed southeast east from Etosha, then south to the Namibian capital, Windhoek, arriving mid-afternoon. The journey was a bit slower than anticipated because of the strong cross wind’s impact upon the truck.
Windhoek is a city of (an estimated) 500,009 people situated in a bowl in some ranges at an altitude of around 1,655 metres above sea level . You probably wouldn’t call it ‘charming’ , but it’s not super ugly either. A ‘highlight’ pointed out as we drove into the CBD (and maybe only 5km from it) was a large abattoir and meat processing plant. You get the drift. It was also a weird feeling being back in a city with traffic after the sparsely occupied Namibian bush.
Tuesday afternoon’s activity was a guided walk around some sites in the centre of Town. We saw and learned way to much about a rather dull Lutheran church built in 1907. Then it was onto the Parliament House gardens ( viewed from the outside, no one allowed in), the Parliament ( again viewed from the outside) and a surreal ‘golden’ building / museum built by the North Koreans . Perhaps against better judgment we were allowed inside this one – a notable feature was the slowest and smallest lift (elevator) in sub-Saharan Africa. We can only hope North Korean rockets work as well…
In a nutshell, the darling democratic people of North Korea helped the newly formed SWAPO government of Namibia in the 1990s by relieving it of some pesky uranium ore. Doubtless great altruism by the Koreans.🤔
At some point the Namibians went ‘hey , that’s our uranium, how about some money?’. North Korea, being North Korea, went ‘ well, er, umm , our money is worth diddly and we don’t have any FOREX, so how about some crappy buildings’? ‘Cool’ said the Namibians. And that is how the North Koreans built the golden building known as the ‘coffee machine’ and the building for the Reserve Bank of Namibia.
Sadly for the advance of world wide democratic people’s republics, Namibia and the DPRK no longer have diplomatic relations. Apparently the world offered the Namibians a choice between trade with either the DPRK or the world and they chose the world. But in good news, the Namibians found some one else reliable and a safe to look after all their pesky uranium deposits. These are now all operated by the PRC. Yay.
We also learnt about the ‘Genocide War’ of 1904 conducted by the colonial Germans against the Nama and Herero people. This was accompanied by a visit to the quite stark genocide memorial. The stories of the genocide were brutal.
After a night in Windhoek we will head this morning to the east and cross into Botswana sometime on the early afternoon. Namibia has been an amazing place with stunning landscapes, fantastic game viewing and really warm and friendly people. It’s now time to check out the Kalahari Desert and the Okavango Delta.
Ness’ and Mark’s Wandering 