Namibia: infrastructure and what to know before travel

Namibia is a very unusual country for South Africa. Firstly, it is African safe. In the sense that if you move through the streets during the day, you will not be robbed, killed or raped. With a very high probability. If you are afraid for your safety, it is better to start exploring Africa south of Kenya just from Namibia.



Secondly, there are a lot of animals, right there, and in a week you can see everything that you only read about in childhood in African stories. I have never seen such a convenient and varied observation in any reserve, even in the famous Kruger Park in neighboring South Africa.



Thirdly, here, as elsewhere in Africa, it is very strange.

Therefore, we again have a minute of Friday's urbanism with a story about a country with a bunch of minerals, a very low population density and at the same time quite developed.

Where did Windhoek come from

This is the name of the capital of the country. 335 thousand inhabitants live in the capital (although this is the data of 2012, and there are a lot of illegal buildings there). In total, the country is officially about 2.5 million people. Windhoek on average is located at an altitude of more than one and a half kilometers above sea level, which creates a very special climate here: hellishly dry, constantly windy and the rainy season looks like we have a drought. With rare exceptions.

On the one hand, the Windy Corner, of course, is the capital and economic center, and on the other, by our standards, a rather provincial city. However, there are huge shopping centers, a university and everything else.


<sup>Rich Klaime


District</sup>

The city was built largely by the Germans who occupied the region at one time, so there is a rather high proportion of the German population. Then the territory was captured by South Africa, and in 1990 independence was declared.


^{Lutheran church since German times.}

The city consists of the old German core, new residential areas, industrial zones and slums. The slums here are very similar to the South African townships, but somewhat more capital - they are built not by the fecal-dendral method, but from a profiled sheet and sticks. Gravity-type toilets are still used in residential areas, although toilets in yards are increasingly connected to sewers and water.


<sup>Ordinary slum


Brought water</sup>

Electricity coal centralized and based on solar panels for those who can afford it.



In Windhoek itself, as the name implies, the wind constantly blows, but windmills are used very rarely because they are noisy. In villages far away and on farms, windmills are already the basis of food.


<sup>This is a cafe. Russian is a bald smooth sausage.


There are a lot of such houses with a photocopier and a computer - this is because residents constantly need to look for work and take copies of documents for submitting resumes. The computer is game for them, everything is done through the phone.</sup>

If you hold copper for the Internet, it is immediately rewound and passed. Therefore, if you are not in an expensive residential area, poles with Wi-Fi are installed for you - Golden Telecom did something similar in Moscow and started Iota (they first had a slightly redone Wimax, then they switched to LTE). Cellular Internet is quite fast and decent, about 500 rubles per gigabyte. Only the local MTS is lying, which covers 98% of the country. This is by population, that is, reserves and wildlife sanctuaries without communication.

The official language is now English, but five local ones are used, Afrikaans (this is such a surzhik based on Dutch, English and German), and, in fact, German. Ndonga (one of the local languages) is native to about half of Namibians. 85% of the population are able to read (also for 2012).

Half of the export is made up of minerals (lots of uranium, diamonds and various metals). A third of the export of services is the processing of foreign tourists. Tourists come here approximately as to Iceland, in 2017 they talked about 1.5 million people from all over the world.


^{A dead giraffe is very convenient for hanging scarves, right?}

The country is flat (with the exception of a couple of hills near the deserts) and is a continuous bush - a shrubby steppe with trees, sometimes compacted to the likeness of a forest. Therefore, it is convenient to graze small horned, medium horned and cattle. The smallest horned, by the way, dikdik antelope , it is not very tasty, very wild and very evil. With us, one stiffly gored stalk of grass. Generally, they are desperate beasts for their size.



At the airport, you will change money and get two currencies at once: the local Namibian dollar and the South African rand. No need to be scared. The dollar always follows the rand and is equal to it, so the rand is more universal: it goes here and in South Africa. But the Namibian dollar does not pay the neighbors.


^{Market The}

country was one of the poorest in Africa (for all minerals and a rather small population), but then the government decided that a lot should be invested in education. Here they built the right university and began to train engineers in the first place.

The transport here is magical. Traffic in the city is a taxi. Just go outside and catch a car with a huge number on board. The price of the trip is about 90 rubles to any place in the city, 120 - to the suburbs and 200 rubles, if you want something strange. At the same time, there may already be passengers in the car or the driver can take them along the road if they are in the same direction. The railway here historically was one and military, still from the Germans. Passenger cars here are seen as a necessary evil and cling to goods. Do not like it - take the bus. There is a branded train "Desert Express" to Swakopmund - the second cool and very tourist city on the coast. A couple of the main routes are asphalted, then the primers are waiting for you. Left-hand traffic. Car rental is well developed, and there will be a tracker in the cars so that you don’t fall for anything. Aviation is the perfect Air Namibia.A lot of light aviation and platforms for it.


^{The best thing that can happen to you in Windhoek is a visit to the Trans-Namibian Railway Museum. True, after me there are slightly fewer exhibits: they can be bought! Now the plate from the 1904 steam locomotive is in our office.}

Russians do not need a visa. Just zagran in the hand and passport control. Need an address inside the country (at least a hotel on the first night).

The right way to travel around Namibia is to either take a car and go around the country, or arrange with the national parks about transfers to and from them. Insurance is highly recommended, there are often accidents with animals that suddenly jumped onto the road.



Lose this situation in your head in advance and remember that it’s better to drive through small ones than to dive sideways from a mountain road.



But on this we drove around the city. “But it’s easy to repair, we grind the details ourselves,” the driver immediately explained:




<sup>Group cars. Folding chairs, a table, lanterns, tools, plates, forks, two gas cylinders and two burners are loaded into the trunk, there is a refrigerator with its own battery and the ability to connect the on-board network to the city. By the way, this refrigerator will be checked at the exit from national parks.


This is an important part of the trunk. It is not perfectly sealed, so in dry weather you need to open the hatch so that the incoming air creates excessive pressure inside and does not suck in dust, which is simply unmeasured here. But in the rain it must be closed.</sup>

It’s better to have cash, it’s hard with cards, but you can pay at the main points. They don’t really bother with sites here, the Internet has not yet become a single point of truth, so you are very lucky if the site is. And most often it will be Jumla with the standard headers of Jumla herself. But there are newspapers. And they are read.

Food - here you can try all the antelopes (they are hunted outside the national parks, and they are part of the country's agriculture).





You can look into the food lovers market, which is still loved by South Africa, which is located in shopping centers, or if you are a very risky person, go to the market and buy canned spinach:



It canned, obviously, by drying in cakes. If you suddenly lack protein in your body, and regular meat is expensive, then just remember that the worms also have a lot of protein, and they also dry perfectly:



Here, meet a trading woman who received a fee for the photo more than her daily earnings on the market:



IT is developed according to the principle “anyway, without this, nowhere is possible”. The most high-tech that I saw during the trip - a guy named MC Cloudtechnologies worked in an exchanger at the airport. He pressed Printscreen as a check for the exchange (literally, he printed a screen with the form, how much and where to change from the local analogue 1C). In the future, this life hack was used in every exchange for Windhoek.


<sup>« », , , . .


, , . — .</sup>

The country has surprisingly many interesting things. The most important, of course, are wildlife sanctuaries (including private ones). Animals come right to you. It is strictly forbidden to shoot in wildlife sanctuaries, because otherwise the economy of Namibia will suffer - animals will run away, and this is a third of the export of services.


<sup>Impala, fast food in Africa The


lion family approached 15 meters to the road, which after a while formed a traffic jam.


It was they who were hiding from the rain under a tree especially good


grazing antelope Oryx gazella mound and


see him so close - a great success</sup>

Actually, the national park consists of a bunch of infrastructure facilities, a biostation, a farm or similar, a central building (usually there is a restaurant, a shop and a reception), heaps of houses right on the territory and a camping site. Everything where you should spend the night is fenced off from a large beast. The rest is the territory of animals. Very often, the central building is placed near the watering hole, so that in the evening from the restaurant to watch how the whole bush comes to visit. Here is a typical view from the window (in the afternoon):



And in another place in the evening:



There are several types of activities: safari (you look at the animals in the car), tracking (you track the beast), hatching in a hide (actually the ranger brings you a chair and water, and you look at the exit from the mink or something like that).


^{Sat the meerkat}

And more walks with a stored beast. There are some animals that cannot be released into the wild either because of their age, or because they recover from the operation, or because they were picked up small, and they do not have the necessary skills. They catch a radio beacon and, as tourists say, "now we will go where they walk in the morning and take a walk with them." In fact, the ranger most often brings the beast, parks in the bushes and releases it:



And you see this. You can’t iron, you cannot squat, photograph from 3-5 meters - you can:


<sup>Cheetah. The farmer called, said, "I shot a cheetah, who was trying to lift a goat, and she had a kitten." He does not know how to hunt for anything larger than chicken (instincts help there), so he won’t survive in the wild.


, -. , , . , .





, . , : .


, . , , . - , - . .</sup>

A very special children's lesson: feeding a leopard. There is an elevator in hemp, meat is served from there. You (or rather, a school class) are sitting in the bunker, the ranger holds his hand on the shutter lowering lever:



With the right approach, you can “change the picture” about five times in one trip, see:


<sup>Wet National Parks


“Death Valley” in the dunes with trees that dried up about 800 years ago.


The blossoming bush


“Skeleton Coast” is the place where the skeletons of the ships bring along (cormorants wound up on this)




Deserted lands


and the end of the world</sup>

There are tribes in the country, for example, Himba, famous due to the National Geographic.



They have parking near the gas station, and for the money they let inside:



True, they are constantly trying to vparit something:



This girl makes money at a gas station. First, he puts two fingers in his mouth and says: "The same is not a man of pa sis jour." Then he offers a selfie with her for an amount of 200 to 50 Russian rubles.



steazehe said that photographs of the last post are only about pale-faced people. Here, look what the locals look like:









It’s worth a look at a couple of settlements "on the frontier":





And look at the dunes.

Safety

It’s worth remembering that even local people don’t walk around the city at night, it’s better to keep the camera in front of you (or take out if necessary) in the cities, drink from a pre-closed bottle, and shake your shoes in the morning for snakes and insects.


^{This is a ready-made telegram sticker. In fact - a sign explaining that you cannot pick up hitchhikers (specifically here - because they will rob you). Moreover, if you pick up a hitchhiker, and for some reason he does not rob you, the ranger will fine you later, because the law is the law.}

The farther you are from the city center, the less is the man-made danger and the more nature wants to get to know you. If in Australia it is enough to follow a dozen simple rules, then the threat here comes from insects.


^{Some just want to drink your beer}

And some don't mind eating your blood. This is not a glare near the lamps, about two kilograms of mosquitoes in the frame:



Usually it’s the steppe, but in January it’s the rainy season, and in the evening it starts to buzz with mosquitoes:



Fortunately, now there is a normal remedy for malaria that gets all the causative agents cunning plasmodium, which stuck from quinine into the liver. Unfortunately, they sell it only according to prescriptions (the Troika card helped me, which I slapped on the table and said that it was a strong Russian prescription, the doctor suffered, wrote out, and if you cannot read it, well, that’s your problem).


<sup>Test systems can be bought for 150-200 of our rubles in almost any pharmacy. The phrase “Dear, I have two stripes” has a slightly different meaning in the country.


Well, if it says "Do not get out of the car" - it is better not to get out of the car</sup>

Well, something like this. Now links: a little more details about the country in our telegram channel: Skeleton Coast , Death Valley , about the tribe , Fallout Town . Here is the last post about the protection of animals (some are protected for tourism, some are protected as we are beef, and some are consciously and cool). Well, on Habré there is a wonderful hub " Urbanism ", where there is a lot of everything about the city systems.