Today was essentially a day of travelling, flying from Addis Ababa to Windhoek via Johannesburg.
Like so many recent days, our wake-up was very early once again. I set the alarm for 5:30 am, which meant I had only four and a half hours sleep; this was as a result of spending several answering e-mails for work the previous night. I managed to answer all the messages I had received on Google’s G-mail, but the LPC server (which hosts messages for my other e-mail address) was down and I could not access any of these messages. However, when I checked this morning at 5:30 am (which was 10:30 am Hong Kong time), I found the server had been repaired and was working again. The problem then was that I didn’t have the couple of hours needed to clear the backlog, as we had to go to the airport to catch our flight. I did spend almost 45 minutes clearing as many as I could, but with the slow connection speed in Addis Ababa, that number was depressingly small. That left me 15 minutes to shower, dress and finish packing before leaving for the airport - yes, it was a bit rushed.
Our first flight was from Addis Ababa to Johannesburg on an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737. The flight took five and half hours, and was very smooth and pleasant with excellent food (both Andy and I had the Nile perch).
We had a two hour transit in Johannesburg, and discovering that wireless internet access was available, we decided to spend an hour catching up with e-mails. By using internet sharing, we both had internet access on our respective computers. The connection speed was an order of magnitude better than we had been receiving in Addis Ababa, so I was able to clear the entire backlog of about 70 messages that were banked up on the LPC server. Holidays for this school principal are never really very distant from the decisions that still need to be made, even when travelling in remote parts of Africa.
Our second flight from Johannesburg to Windhoek took just over two hours on an Air Namibia Boeing 737. The plane was quite lightly loaded, so we had plenty of room to spread out and move around. I had not only the two seats between me and the aisle free, but also two entire rows in front of me and four rows behind me completely free.
Upon arrival in Windhoek, we travelled by minivan from the airport to our guesthouse in Windhoek. Initial impressions of the Namibian landscape upon leaving the airport (post-sunset) were of landforms and vegetation not unlike the area around Alice Springs in central Australia. Initial impressions of Windhoek are of a small city that is modern, clean, prosperous, ordered and fairly affluent - certainly the level of economic development is considerably higher than anything we experienced in Ethiopia! In many ways, it is reminiscent of a medium sized Australian town such as Canberra, except for the dominance here of German cars (Mercedes, BMW and Volkswagens) and the preponderance of German street names - consequences, I guess, of Namibia’s former status as a German colony.
Our accommodation, the Olive Grove Guesthouse, is heaven compared with anything we experienced in Ethiopia. The rooms are light, clean, modern and spacious, and everything works - even wireless internet! We had dinner this evening at the guesthouse, a superb meal of vegetable soup with home-baked bread, salad, fish and home-made chocolates with coffee.
Yes, everything works here - after two weeks in Ethiopia, I no longer take that for granted.
