Loubser - Tgon's Travels

On Monday, Charlie arrived at around lunch time and we went for some pizza in ‘The Raft’, a restaurant on the Walvis Bay lagoon, afterwards we walked into town and met four of the other people who shipped their bikes with us. Everyone checked into the hotel where I had been staying so that we could sort out the customs stuff for the bikes.

On Tuesday morning we went to the office to hand over all our documents and were hoping to get the bikes that afternoon, we waited in the hotel all day but nothing actually happened, so we had a BBQ instead. The next day the container was ready to be opened, we all went down and unloaded the bikes. I was the only person who doesn’t have a Carnet de Passage, so I had extra paperwork to do in order to get a temporary import permit. This also included me leaving a 400 Euro deposit, which will be refunded once I leave Namibia with the bike. It was during the unpacking of the container that I realised my digital camera is broken, last weekend when I was on the sand dunes some sand has gotten into the zoom lens and it is now jammed, but we have our bikes back and Charlie is lending me one of his cameras, so overall it was a good day.

We were hoping to leave Walvis Bay on Thursday, but first I needed to do some work on the bike. The clutch lever had been broken during the journey in the container and I have been having some electrical problems since Greece, plus I wanted to do a service on the bike. It took a lot longer than expected to get hold of some oil, an oil filter, a new horn, a replacement clutch lever and some chain lube, so we got back to the hotel at sunset and I did all the work by torch light. Then on Friday we finally left Walvis bay, firstly driving north a little way to see some nicer beaches, then refuelling before heading east. We planned to travel through some mountain passes to end up in southern Namibia to do some camping, but while we were driving Charlie started to have some problems with his BMW F800. We decided to continue east to Windhoek so that he could get it repaired. We are now in Windhoek staying in a hostel called the cardboard box, hopefully the repairs wont take long and we can head south this weekend.

I arrived in Namibia on the 30th of March and stayed in Windhoek for 4 night before I headed out to Walvis Bay. Windhoek itself is not a great place to spend your time, the streets are wide and clean but they are empty, there doesn’t seem to be any people around even though it is the capital city. Luckily I stayed in a nice guest house with some Germans who are here for work or studies. After four nights I headed west to Walvis Bay, just after I arrived I read my Email and realised that four of the people I shipped the bike with were staying in another guest house just a few minutes walk from where I had stayed in Windhoek. I also found that we weren’t going to get the bikes back on Thursday as I had imagined. So I checked into another guest house here in Walvis Bay and settled in, ready for the rest of the guys to arrive.

While I have been staying here, two girls I had met in Windhoek came here for the Easter weekend and by chance, they had booked into the same place I was staying. At the same time, two guys from the UK checked in too. One of the guys now lives and works in Kenya but had taken four months off to travel around southern Africa, it was good to meet him because he had done the journey I am about to do. Walvis Bay is nice but it is very quiet, I haven’t really enjoyed the coast very much because I have spent time in Ghana, where the weather is warm and the beaches are nicer. On Sunday we went out to Dune 7, an outdoor adventure centre in the desert, people do quad rides and dune surfing.

It seemed expensive to me and the service wasn’t good, we were originally told that we needed to wait an hour, then after that hour they told us to wait 45 minutes. We got our money back and drove north to do some dune boarding for free with a board we had borrowed from our guest house. On Monday morning the English guys and the girls I’d met in Windhoek left Walvis Bay, later that day Charlie arrived. We went for a walk through town and met the rest of the guys by chance at the side of the road. We all headed back to Loubser guest house and spent the afternoon drinking beer and catching up. We should get the bikes back today or maybe tomorrow and then we can explore more of Namibia, I can’t wait.

Tag: Loubser

Week 40: Getting the bikes back

Week 39: Windhoek and Walvis Bay