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There is a moment, in the last hours before a long journey, when a place you have only just started to know suddenly feels like it is showing you its true colours. Not the tourist-board version, not the list of landmarks to tick off, but the way the light falls on a particular street corner at a particular time of day. I woke this morning in my guesthouse in Klein Windhoek, and I lay there for a while, listening. The city was still. Just the sound of a bird, and the faint hum of a car somewhere below. It felt like the whole of Windhoek was holding its breath, waiting for the afternoon heat to arrive.

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I got up and made coffee in the little kitchenette. The water heater clicked and shuddered, and I thought about how these small rituals — the coffee, the planning, the checking of the map — become the texture of a life. I have been here for a week now, a week of paperwork and wandering, of learning the names of streets and the weight of the sun. And today, my last full day before I point the car west, I wanted to do something simple. I wanted to walk the city one more time, not as a newcomer trying to absorb everything, but as someone who was leaving for a while and wanted to say a proper goodbye.

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I walked down into the centre, past the jacaranda trees that are still bare, their purple bloom a few weeks away. The air was cool, that sharp August morning air that makes you feel like the day has potential. I passed the Christuskirche, its sandstone walls glowing in the low sun. A group of tourists were taking photos, the same photos I took on my first day. I smiled, recognising myself in them. I crossed the street and went into the little café on Tal Street, the one I have been meaning to try. I ordered a coffee and sat by the window, watching the city wake up. The barista, a young woman with a gentle manner, asked where I was headed. I told her the coast, then north. She nodded, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. 'Moro,' she said, which is how people greet each other here, a word that carries a whole sense of ease with it. I felt, for a moment, less like a visitor.

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The coffee was good. Strong and dark. About forty Namibian dollars, which is nothing, really — a couple of American dollars. It struck me how much of my first week has been about calibrating my sense of money, about understanding what things cost and what they are worth. The rent on my flat in Khomasdal, around five and a half thousand a month, feels steep for a one-bedroom, but it is what the market demands these days, apparently. A meal at a mid-range restaurant, three or four hundred dollars, is a splurge, but a kapana lunch at the market, maybe fifty dollars, is a daily possibility. It is a city of contrasts, not just in its landscapes but in its price tags.

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After my coffee, I walked over to the Namibia Craft Centre, the old brewery building on Tal Street. I went up to the Ombo Art Gallery, just to look. The crafts are beautiful, but I am trying to travel light, so I only bought a small beaded bracelet, a thing of green and blue glass that caught the light. The woman who sold it to me told me it was a gift for a traveller, to keep them safe. I put it on my wrist and felt a little lighter for it. I am told the Craft Centre is a good place for gifts, a curated version of the markets, but the real energy, the real pulse, is at Oshetu, and I wanted one more taste of that before I left.

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So I took a taxi out to Katutura. Not the fancy route, but the one that goes past the Single Quarters, past the new houses and the old, past the people walking with purpose. The taxi was a shared one, a combi, and I sat in the back with a woman carrying a bag of oranges and a man who smelled of sweat and cigarettes. No one said much. That is the way it is sometimes. I paid the driver a few dollars and got out by the Oshetu Community Open Market. The smell hit me first — smoke, and meat, and dust. It is a good smell. An honest smell. I walked over to one of the kapana stands, where the queues were already forming, and I joined the back of the line. There is a ritual to it, a rhythm. You wait, you watch the butcher slice the beef, you see it hit the grill and hear the oil sizzle, you get your paper-wrapped portion and you eat it standing, hot and spiced.

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My little packet cost about fifty dollars — under three dollars, the equivalent of a cheap sandwich back home, but here it is a whole meal, a whole experience. I stood there, chewing, watching the life of the market swirl around me. People buying vegetables, catching up with friends, haggling over prices. A woman with a stall full of tomatoes called out to me, asking if I was a tourist. I said I was new, that I was staying in Khomasdal. She laughed and said that made me a neighbour, so she gave me an extra tomato, a small red one, warm from the sun. I ate it on the spot, the juice running down my chin. It was, I think, the best tomato I have ever had.

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Sitting there, I thought about the week behind me. The visa process at the airport, which was simpler than I feared, though the online application beforehand had been fiddly. The bank account at a branch in the centre, which required my passport and my permit and a proof of address, all of it in order. The SIM card from MTC, bought at the airport arrivals, registered with my passport. The rental car, a little white hatchback, that I picked up on my second day. All of it seems like a blur now, but it was the necessary scaffolding, the work that makes living here possible. And now, with the flat signed and the permits in place, I was free to go.

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The sun was climbing higher, and the streets were getting busier. I thought about the road ahead. West first, towards the coast. The Skeleton Coast, with its fog and its shipwrecks, is a place I have only read about. And before that, the dunes at Sossusvlei, the red giants that rise out of the Namib. I heard the weather would be mild, around twenty-two degrees, which is perfect for walking. The distances, though, are vast. I have been told to fill the tank often, to carry extra water, to check the tyres. These are the rules of the road here, and I am learning them. I am told the drive to Sossusvlei takes about five or six hours, and Etosha is a similar drive north. Not distance, exactly, but a relationship with the horizon.

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I walked back towards the city, through the streets of Katutura, past the Sam Nujoma Stadium, quiet in the middle of the day. I thought about the history of this place, the forced removals that created this township, the decades of struggle. It is a history that does not hide, if you look. The Independence Memorial Museum tells it, in its stark, continental way. I visited it on my third day, and the silence in the galleries felt heavy. But so is the resilience I see in the market, in the people I meet. It is a complicated place, like anywhere, but it wears its history on its sleeve.

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In the afternoon, I went back to the guesthouse to pack. I spread my maps on the bed, the one for the west and the one for the north. I traced the routes with my finger, the towns with their strange-awaking names. I double-checked the reserve at Daan Viljoen, the small game park I drove to on my first weekend, and I thought about the kudu I saw there, watching me from the bush with a calm that felt almost wise. It was a good first taste of the Namibian wild, and it has made me hungry for more.

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For my last dinner in Windhoek, I wanted something familiar, but also something that felt like a proper send-off. I went to Joe's Beerhouse, the big, boisterous place that everyone told me about. It was busy, as always, and I sat at a table outside under the trees, the fairy lights just starting to glow. The menu is long, the portions are generous, and the steaks are famous. I ordered one, medium-rare, and a Windhoek Lager to go with it. The beer is a local point of pride, brewed under that old purity law, and it tastes like a kind of clarity. The steak was excellent, as promised. The whole meal, with the beer, came to around four hundred dollars — twenty-odd American dollars, a proper night out, but worth it for the feeling of sitting there, surrounded by the low murmur of conversation and the smell of wood smoke.

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I was full, and a little tired, and I thought about how this city has a way of getting under your skin. It is not a beautiful city, not in the way of Cape Town or some other capitals. It is a working city, a city of dust and of government buildings and of long, straight streets that start and end in the bush. But it has a gravity, a sense of being a place where things are real. I walked back to the guesthouse slowly, through the quiet streets of Klein Windhoek, past the embassies and the boutique guesthouses. The sky was clear, and the stars were starting to appear, the same stars I would see tonight, but from a different spot, with different thoughts in my head.

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I stopped at the gate of my guesthouse, a place called Magnolia House, with its clipped hedges and its unassuming charm. I stood there for a minute, looking back at the city, the lights of the centre a soft glow in the distance. I thought about tomorrow, about the long drive west, about the dunes and the coast and the quiet of the desert. But I was not thinking about what I was leaving behind. I was thinking about what I was carrying with me. The taste of that tomato, the weight of that bracelet, the sound of a woman calling me a neighbour. These are the souvenirs that matter. I opened the gate, and I went inside, ready for the road.

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Goodnight, Windhoek. It has been a good first week. Tomorrow, the west.