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Sunday Jan 14, 2007

Best Holiday Ever - Third and Final Instalment

 

Well, I'm back in Lüderitz, after having 6 weeks of a completely lekker holiday. When I last wrote I was in Cape Town, so I'll update you from there. Us 5 Namibian volunteers met up with all the South African Project Trust volunteers when we got to Cape Town – about 20 of us were staying in the same hostel which was so much fun. I had, hands down, the most amazing New Year of my life. We were staying on Long Street which is like the party centre of Cape Town; one of the clubs had blocked off one of the side streets and covered it with canopies so that the club extended out into the street, and they had an outdoor DJ set. Even when you were out on the main street you could hear music coming from all the different clubs so loads of people were just dancing round in the road. We spent some time up on the balcony of the backpackers just watching the massive party below. One of the other volunteers produced a load of sparklers from somewhere so everyone on the street could see us having a mini-rave on the balcony, hehe. At midnight in the street party they fired hundreds of fake million-rand notes in the air – I carried one round in my purse for the rest of the holiday and kept mistaking it for real money!

Me and 3 other volunteers made a pact to stay out until the sun came up – we outdid ourselves, I must say. If got light around 6 but it wasn't until half 7 that we finally stumbled back to the backpackers, exhausted but happy, with a police line tied round various parts of our bodies, and collapsed into bed.

Later on New Year's Day we went to the beach, it was boiling hot so by the time we got there we were dying to just jump straight into the sea. As we got closer we noticed that everyone seemed to be crowded round the water's edge but not actually swimming; we then realised this was because there was a shark lurking in the shallows. It didn't move for the whole time we were there so we couldn't swim, I wasn't impressed but didn't fancy taking my chances with the shark...

As well as partying we did touristy things too, of which the most fun was going up table mountain. We went in the cable car which has a floor that rotates as you go up so you can see the full view – not great for one of the guys who doesn't like heights, but everyone else loved it!

The day before we left Tristan, one of the Botswanan volunteers, got some bad news. He'd been feeling ill for a few days and went to the doctors to find out what was wrong, and was told he had malaria. We'd planned to go straight up to Botswana with him and his partner, but he couldn't return to a malarial area until he was better. We waited in Pretoria for a few days (not that I minded that much – the backpackers we were staying in had a swimming pool) only to find out that he in fact had food poisoning, so we could have gone to Botswana after all...

Me and Bozena spent hours in a travel agents attempting to sort out a way of getting from Botswana back to Namibia. We'd booked onto a bus from Maun to Windhoek, or so we thought – when we tried to confirm our bookings we found out that the company had closed down, and was the only one that runs between the two cities. In the end we completely changed our plans and decided to go to Swaziland instead. Why not?

Swaziland is a tiny kingdom inside South Africa with it's own language (Seswati) and currency (Emelengeni). It's a beautiful part of the world, we spent almost an entire day swimming by an amazing waterfall. On one side of the river were sheer cliffs covered in twisting vines, and the other river bank was shaded by spreading trees. All 5 of us had got so used to how arid Namibia is that the amount of green in South Africa and Swaziland seemed strange!

We went to a village inside Mantenga nature reserve, where we were shown round and saw some traditional Swazi dancing. Our guide gave us all positions in the family and I ended up as second wife to the chief. I know my place... It was fun though, we stopped where an old woman was selling necklaces and the 'chief' of the group bought me one, which he put over my head as the Swazi way of betrothal. When I told Marcel about it he said, “What are you like, I leave you alone for 10 minutes and you get married?”

We also saw our first rain for months – unfortunately, we were camping. I have never seen rain that heavy, you stood in it for 10 seconds and were completely drenched. After a few minutes we realised there was no point in attempting to stay dry so we just ran round in the rain storm shrieking like little kids. Was a lot of fun, but we ended up booking into a backpackers' dorm for the last couple of nights when the rain showed no sign of letting up and our tents were completely sodden.

We met an English guy called Dave in the backpackers, and in the course of chatting to each other I discovered that he's starting the same university as me next year – it's such a small world! We laughing about how we can try and seem really cool by just dropping into conversation, “Oh yeah, we met in Swaziland...”

Well, this is a ridiculously long entry and I should really be doing something newspaper-linked so I'll leave it at this. It's been an amazing holiday but it's nice to be home, and that's what Lüderitz feels like now. As we drove towards the town yesterday a sandstorm started up, and me, Bozena and Marcel were like, “Ah, we're back...”

Posted by Lucy Hayes ( 3:02 PM )
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