The showgrounds are busy this morning. Not in a chaotic way, but in a purposeful one. I drove past on my way into the city centre, and the parking lots were filling with bakkies and sedans, people in reflective vests and hard hats milling around the entrances. The Namibia Mining Expo opened today, and I'm told it has sold out all its exhibition space for the first time ever — 222 exhibitors, apparently. I am not a mining person, but you feel the weight of it here, the sense that this small city of just under four hundred thousand people is holding something much larger than its size suggests.
It is the fourth of August, a Tuesday, and the air has that particular winter crispness that Windhoek does so well. Nine degrees this morning, climbing to about twenty-two by mid-afternoon. I woke to a grey, overcast sky, which is unusual for this time of year, but the sun burned through by nine and now the city is all sharp shadows and low golden light. The jacarandas are still weeks away from blooming, but the streets have a clean, swept feeling, as if the whole place took a deep breath over the weekend and is only now exhaling.
The weekend, I should say, was not quiet. Saturday morning, the Bank Windhoek Red Run took over the central streets — thousands of people running five, ten, or twenty-one kilometres through town for charity. I walked down to Independence Avenue to watch the early finishers come through, and the energy was something else. Families with strollers, serious club runners in their sponsored kits, old men in faded club singlets. A prize pool of seventy thousand Namibian dollars apparently, which is real money. But what I remember most is the sound of it — not cheering, exactly, but a kind of collective huffing and laughing and the slap of sneakers on tarmac, and then the quiet that settled once the roads reopened and the city went back to being a city.
I have been in Namibia for four days now. The paperwork is done — visa, tax number, bank account, the SIM card that now sits in my phone with an MTC number I am slowly memorising. The rental car is a white Toyota Corolla, unremarkable and perfect, and I have learned to check my mirrors twice before pulling out because the traffic here moves with a kind of confident, unspoken etiquette that takes a while to read. The fuel gauge works, the tyres are good, and I have already driven it out to Daan Viljoen and back, so I trust it. That matters, because in a few days I will point it west and not stop until the Atlantic.
But today is about the city, and about making it home. I have been looking at flats — that is the thread I keep pulling. The housing situation here is tight, the way it is in any city people actually want to live in. Rents have been climbing, I am told, with the average two-bedroom up something like fourteen per cent last year, and demand far outstrips supply. The flat I viewed in Khomasdal — a modest one-bedroom on a quiet street with a small garden and a landlord who seemed genuinely kind — was going for about five thousand Namibian dollars a month. Roughly two hundred and seventy US dollars. That feels reasonable to me, though I understand it is not cheap by local standards. The landlord said there were three other people coming to see it that afternoon. I told him I would let him know by Thursday.
I had coffee at a place called Shema Coffee, which sits in a narrow building in Klein Windhoek, in that cluster of guesthouses and embassies and small restaurants that makes the area feel like a village that happens to be attached to a capital. The coffee was good, properly good, the kind of dark roast that cuts through a winter morning. I paid about forty Namibian dollars for a flat white, which is around two US dollars, and I sat by the window and watched the street wake up. A woman in running clothes walked past with a Jack Russell. A courier on a motorcycle threaded through the traffic. Two men in suits stood outside a guesthouse, talking with the easy familiarity of people who have known each other for years.
From there I walked to the Namibia Craft Centre on Tal Street, in the old breweries building. I am not much of a shopper, but I wanted to see what the city makes with its hands. There are stalls selling carved wooden animals, woven baskets, jewellery, paintings. I bought a small bowl turned from mopane wood, dark and smooth, for a hundred and fifty Namibian dollars — about eight dollars — because I have a rule about buying one thing from a place that I will actually use. It sits on the table in my guesthouse room now, holding the spare keys to the Corolla. Upstairs there is an art gallery, and I spent a while looking at landscapes of the Skeleton Coast and Damaraland, paintings that made me ache to be on the road already.
I have been planning that road, piecing together the map of the next two years. The spine of it, as I keep telling myself, runs west and then north. First Sossusvlei, the great dunes, about a five- or six-hour drive from here, depending on how many times I stop to take photographs of nothing in particular. Then up the coast, through the Skeleton Coast, which I have only ever seen in photographs, and inland through Damaraland, that strange and ancient landscape of red rock and desert-adapted elephants. And then Etosha, the great salt pan, which by late August is at its peak for game viewing as the animals concentrate around the shrinking waterholes. I have a rough itinerary pencilled into a notebook that lives in my backpack, but I am trying not to over-plan. Namibia rewards patience and punishes rigidity.
There is other business to attend to. The city is filling up with visitors — the Mining Expo at the Showgrounds this week, and then the Tour de Windhoek cycling race next week, which will bring rolling road closures through the city and the surrounding countryside, and then a big oil and gas conference the week after that, which apparently will pack the hotels. I was told, low-confidence but worth knowing, that the conference brings close to two thousand delegates, and accommodation gets genuinely tight. So if you are planning to be in Windhoek in the third week of August, the advice is to book early, or to stay outside the centre. There is also talk around town about a water pipeline project out towards Groot Aub, a ground-breaking ceremony at the end of July that has people feeling cautiously optimistic about the city's water security. It is the kind of local story you only pick up by sitting in coffee shops and listening.
I took the afternoon to drive up to the Oshetu market in Katutura, because I wanted a proper lunch and because the kapana there is the real thing. If you have not had kapana, it is grilled beef, chopped into strips, spiced and served on paper, usually with salsa and a piece of vetkoek, the fried bread. At the Old Single Quarters market, a small portion will cost you around twenty to forty-five Namibian dollars, and a full plate with salsa and bread about fifty-three. I paid fifty-three, plus a cold drink, and sat on a plastic chair under a canvas awning and watched the market do its thing. There is a rhythm there, a kind of controlled chaos. Women fanning coals, men calling out prices, the smell of grilled meat and wood smoke hanging in the air. A woman at the next table was selling beaded jewellery from a cardboard box, and she smiled at me and said something in Oshiwambo that I did not fully catch, but the gist was clear enough. I smiled back and said moro, and she laughed and patted my arm.
The thing about Windhoek that I am only beginning to understand is how small it feels, despite being the capital. I have been here four days and I have already run into the same faces twice — the barista from Shema Coffee at the market, a runner from Saturday's race at the Craft Centre. It is a city of roughly four hundred thousand people, but it behaves like a town. There is a gentleness to it that I did not expect. The German colonial layer is visible — the Christuskirche, the Tintenpalast, the street names — but underneath it, there is something else, something more recent and more hopeful. The Independence Memorial Museum, with its uncompromising lines, stands at the top of the avenue, and you can stand in its shadow and feel the weight of what this country has done in just over three decades of freedom.
Tonight, I have my eye on dinner at a place called The Stellenbosch Wine Bar and Bistro, which I have been walking past all week and finally have an excuse to try. A mid-range meal here runs about two hundred and fifty to five hundred Namibian dollars per person, and a Windhoek Lager costs somewhere between thirty-five and sixty. I will probably eat alone, with a book, and that is fine. I am still in the phase of being an observer here, of collecting impressions rather than forming conclusions. The road trips will come, and with them the deeper stories. But for now, the city is the story. A city of dust and paperwork and good coffee and market smoke, a city that is still, in the best way, becoming itself.
I have been thinking about what it means to live somewhere, as opposed to visiting. There is a difference, and it is not just about having a bank account or knowing where the good hardware store is. It is about learning the pace. The way the city empties on a Saturday morning for a fun run and then fills again by noon. The way the light falls across the Auas Mountains in the late afternoon, turning the granite pink. The way a stranger will nod at you on the street, not in the guarded way of a big city, but with a genuine, unhurried recognition that you are here, and that being here is enough. I am learning that pace. I am learning to slow down.
Tomorrow I will drive out to Avis Dam, which I am told is a good spot for a morning walk, and I will keep working on the housing situation. The Khomasdal flat is still in play, and I have a viewing lined up for a place in Kleine Kuppe, though I suspect the rent there will be out of my range. The Corolla is parked outside, and the mopane bowl is on the table, and the notebook with the roadmap is in my bag. The pieces are slowly coming together. The city is becoming familiar. And somewhere out there, west and then north, the dunes and the coast and the great open spaces are waiting. Moro, Windhoek. We will talk soon.
I will be back with you from the road, or from whatever comes next. Until then, this is Helena, signing off from a quiet Tuesday evening in the capital.