The Sketchy Taxis of DOOOOOOM

SO I am at CCF now!!! WOOOO!!!

It was fun timez getting here since I REALLY didn’t want to spend Thanksgiving ALONE in Windhoek. However, the shuttle to Otji I wanted to take left about a half hour after my flight landed and it takes about an hour to get TO the shuttle from the airport… anywho, here is the FULL story…

The day before I left was a mad rush of TRYING to figure out where the HECK to store my stuff and returning my bedding, checking out of my room, packing the last bits of my stuff all while trying to study for a test I had to write at 5pm. And seriously, I have NO idea what I studied. I STILL don’t know what half those readings were about seeing as I was thinking about all the stuff I had to do before I left. Turns out it didn’t really matter since the teacher just COPIED questions from our last test… I didn’t even NEED to study all that stuff! GAH! Well, at least I know I’ll ace this class seeing as she wanted to keep the TWO things I wrote for that class for future generations to see examples of “good” writing… seriously.

ANYWAYS! Moral of the story is that it was hectic and I spent the last night at UB with no power in my room, sleeping on a bare mattress with no bedding at all, in a dress because it was the comfiest thing I had that could be dirty when I arrived at CCF. Sheesh.

Then I got up at 4:30 to make it down to my cab at 5am because my flight was at about 7:30 and arriving two to three hours before an international flight is sort of a knee jerk reaction… Yeah, the airport was still empty. Not even the STAFF had arrived yet when I got there shortly before 6am. But I sat at a café and waited it out. The coffee was pretty good.

The plane rides and immigration were relatively painless (for once), the REAL adventure started when I landed and needed to actually GET somewhere. I had TRIED to book a shuttle called TownHoppers the night before, but I couldn’t see anyone with that uniform, so when a man in a Spirit Shuttles polo shirt walked up to me and said “shuttle?”, I took him up on it. It took an hour and N$300 to get to the taxi rank in Windhoek, but I made it. There, my shuttle driver helped me to get a shared taxi to Otjiwarongo. (A shared taxi meaning that there were two other girls I didn’t know in there with me.) The shared taxi driver was a hip-hop loving guy with bleach blond hair, but he got me to Otji safely enough. I even dozed off once or twice on the four hour ride. Once I arrived at Otji, I once again had NO IDEA how I was going to make the last leg of my trip to CCF. So I asked my taxi driver. Again. He called some people and drove to a place where there seemed to be a lot of idling taxi men. (This is a common occurrence in Africa and they are ALWAYS eager to get people in their cars). After a bit of negotiation, one man agreed to take me the 45 minutes to CCF. Basically, the entire trip was me placing my trust in sketchy taxi drivers. But sketchy taxi drivers are something that I am becoming alarmingly used to in Africa and they’re really not all that bad.

When I arrived at CCF, I didn’t really know what I was supposed to do… Santa was gone for a few days (the one I had been talking to) and I didn’t REALLY know if anyone else knew I was coming. After some confusion and introducing myself to one of the new interns and figuring out that they DID know, we hauled my stuff to my room, which I am sharing for the moment with Rachel (One of the BEST people I knew last time) and Suzie (a new girl in the ecology department).

Moral of the story is, the trip was an adventure, but I was NOT alone for Thanksgiving dinner.

Which was delicious, by the way, and included PIE.

SO THAT’S TH EPIC TALE!!!! One day poets will make it rhyme and sing it for kings and queens and all that rot. Go me.