First day in Namibia

Friday was a very, very, very long day. Landed in São Paulo at 10 am and our next connection was at 11:30 pm for our overnight to Jo'burg. I had booked us a day room at the Wyndham Tryp hotel which is in the secured in-transit area of the terminal so that we could get some sleep and have a base for the 14 hour layover without going into the public area of the terminal and so avoid having to deal with passport control and security. Good idea on paper but 14 hours marking time is very slow in reality. Slept for a couple of hours and found that the best way of getting through the day was to concentrate on not looking at my watch until at least a half hour had passed since my last look, a game with a remarkably low engagement factor. I was reminded of a movie made 5 or 6 years ago concerning someone who, for unremembered reasons, lost papers?, could not leave the transit area. Couldn't go back and couldn't go forward, had no accommodation so slept on benches, and simply waited. Don't know who wrote the script but it should have been Beckett. I empathized.

Arrived in Jo'burg in the early afternoon on Saturday, slept for a few hours, took the train into the city and had a really good dinner at The Butcher Shop grill, we both had very rare steaks, lots of fresh vegetables and a gallon or so of a wonderful South African cabernet, the single best prescription for re-kindling the ashes.

We stayed at the Intercontinental hotel in the airport, a very nice hotel, and took our checkable bags and checked in at 7 am, returned to our hotel for breakfast and then returned in time for our flight at 9:30. One advantage of this was that our carry-on bags did not accompany us when we checked in, we had left them in our room, but only when we went to security and on to our gate, thus avoiding the negotiation with the check-in agent about the number and weight of our carry ons, a huge relief.

We are now at our first safari camp in Namibia, Okonjima Camp, which is in a massive 220,000 hectare private reserve dedicated to re-introducing orphaned cheetah cubs back into the wild. Long and very interesting story but will write more on that tomorrow.

Picture above is the first sight of Africa, flying in over the desert, with the Atlantic in the background.

Stay tuned.