And... They're Off. Eventually.

We're heading to Namibia in a month. Let's hope we get off to a smoother start than last time. Here's what happened then:

If you fly from Johannesburg to Windhoek, you mostly fly over Botswana. After an hour the clouds stop in a line and below it’s scrub and salt pans, no roads. Before noon you find yourself under a blazing sun, 45 kilometers east of town at Windhoek Hosea Kutako International Airport.

No difference between this patch of scrub and any other between here and Windhoek. Except maybe this particular bit of land used to belong to somebody important’s brother-in-law.

We had a voucher for our rental car that read, “Thrifty Car Rental, Windhoek airport” across the top, but walk past the Avis and Hertz and Imperial counters in the arrivals lobby and hmmm, no Thrifty.

Once we worked out that in fact Thrifty only had a city office and we found the man they’d sent to haul us in, and once we waited just that one quick additional hour for another flight carrying another client – once we made it to the Thrifty Car Rental office in Klein Windhoek, they were happy to ask for another hundred NAD (Namibian dollars) for the transfer back to the airport when we dropped the car off, it being so far and all.

We declined to pay extra for that.

When we finally left Windhoek, at the first police checkpoint on the Rehoboth road  south of town, we had the chance to perspire for the better part of an hour with a stout, entirely agreeable police woman at a shed by the road. There was no registration on our windscreen, you see, a fact noted by the astute policeman at the roadblock (but news to us) and so we’d have to go back to the car rental office.

Not entirely horrible. We weren’t far out of town.

Alternately, the police woman would have to write me a ticket and take my driver’s license, but I was pretty sure I'd never see my license again, and that would be a problem.

She knew this registration thing wasn’t our fault.

Her fellow officer, the sweaty thin guy in shirtsleeves who stood in the road waving down cars (and who nailed us) shook his head at our papers before sending us to the police woman’s shed. Oh, these people are corrupt. He meant Kea, the Thrifty agents.

Cell phone calls from the shed got no answer on the cell number Kea/Thrifty told us to use if we had any trouble, and at one point I graduated from sitting in fealty at the policewoman’s feet on the concrete (it was kind of cool in the shade) to a broken plastic chair beside her. We called and called.

Frustration finally broke the impasse when we found the registration disk in papers in the glove box. Apparently, storing the registration disk there rather than affixing it to the windscreen allowed Kea/Thrifty to share it between multiple cars.

Now there was the new problem of affixing the disk to the windscreen or facing a citation for “failure to display.” I said I had adhesive tape somewhere deep in my camera bag and our police crew just nodded and waved us on our way.

(When we returned the car to Kea/Thrifty I held the registration disk secretly hostage in my pocket until everything was in order, no additional charges. Kea/Thrifty had no idea I had it and I thought about keeping it as a mean-spirited souvenir, but what for? So I gave it back.)

That hour in the police shed wouldn’t have been so bad - you run into stuff like that - except that Air Namibia had lost our bag, so we’d already had to shop for a change of clothes at the Windhoek Mall before we ever got to the roadblock.

So we were multiple hours late leaving town, and commenced a race with sunset that lasted the rest of the afternoon. But we made it, pulling into Sossusvlei Lodge, 82 long kilometers after the last settlement of Solitaire, just as the sun hit the horizon.

Photo of the road to Solitaire, Namibia, from EarthPhotos.com. See many more photos from Namibia in the Namibia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.