April 1, 2025
With a day to enjoy what Windhoek has to offer I set out after breakfast with some of my cycling companions for a 30 minute walk to a nearby mall to exchange some money into the local fare. A mall in Windhoek is about the same as a mall in the US or Canada; throw a rock in any direction and you have good odds on hitting a clothing store. Some have some interesting names that play on the more famous brands. Here I could visit Old Kakai, The Seattle Coffee Company and Woolworths, a store selling woolen fashions. It was a nice enough mall but not really something I was interested in other than to find the money exchange. Here I was able to become fantastically wealthy by exchanging 200 Botswanian pula plus 50 US dollars into a whopping 1,375 Namibian dollars! More riches than King Midas.
I decided to visit an Art and Crafts center in the downtown area and the map showed some other things of interest such as a zoo. I depleted my fortune by NB 40 (about $4.00 Canadian including a tip) for a taxi ride downtown and had to allow the driver to use my phone for directions as he seemed unsure of the way.
Downtown was disappointing. It was dirty and the arts and craft center was a single row of stalls along a half block section of the sidewalk, each displaying nearly the same collection of bracelets and carvings that you could find nearly anywhere. Of course it had the added ambiance of each and every vendor beging you to stop and take a closer look. One pass through of that gauntlet was enough.
The “zoo” was nothing more than a run down park crowded with young men standing around in the shade of some very large trees and nothing more. There were also well guarded shopping malls featuring the same array of stores I had seen earlier. I gave the area about an hour and a half of walking around before hailing a taxi for a ride back to the lodge.
It was at this point that I flagged down God’s Taxi. From the outside it was much the same as the busy fleet of vehicles that are everywhere downtown. No brands like Yellow or Capital but instead, fully licensed and well marked vehicles of nearly every type and color. My taxi was a well worn Honda Fit but once inside it was different from any other taxi I’ve experienced. The driver had a taste for loud church choir music, sung in the native Namibian language and to the tune of old German hymns accompanied with a one tempo organ playing a maximum of five notes. The driver occasionally sang along as we whipped through traffic and pausing only to cut off a pedestrian trying to cross the street or to pick up or discharge another paying fare along the way. My fare for this journey was NB 59 ($5 Canadian). I gave him NB 60 and being the sport that I am, told him to keep the change.