Carsick

There is a point in every vacation- usually toward the end- when a person begins to wonder if the time away was relaxing and rejuvenating or simply exhausting. In Namibia, I began to wonder about this on the road between Sossusvlei and Windhoek. I was sitting in the back seat of a small rental car. Every article of clothing I had with me was dirty, my sinuses were draining and my credit card was warm to the touch. I had moved past worrying about these things, however, and was simply exhausted. “But I’m on holiday,” I thought and smiled.
My travel companions were in the front seats. I knew they were talking, but couldn’t hear what they were saying. Although the road we were on was classified a main road on the map, it was un-tarred. I was beginning to think that the washboard- which was almost constant- might eventually rattle all of the teeth from my head. As concerned as I was about my teeth, however, I was more concerned about the car that was ours for ten days. It was a small white Volkswagen that was obviously not built for off-roading. We had christened it “Schnitzel.” Schnitzel was wearing her spare and had a patched tire in the boot that we were hoping that we wouldn’t have to use.
We had entered Namibia almost two weeks before and had experienced our share of ups and downs. I had been keeping a journal the whole time because of my aspirations to become some sort of travel-writer/humorist/lower middle-class jet-setting playboy. I aspire to this- for the most part- because of the terror that grips my soul when I think of getting a nine-to-five job.
I couldn’t write in Schnitzel’s back seat for a couple of reasons: the washboard would have made the writing illegible and I get carsick. I get very carsick. I can’t read a text message without waves of nausea rolling over my stomach. This means that I have to write while I’m standing still. I’m an aspiring travel writer that can’t write while physically moving from one point to another. This means that I spent a lot of time in Namibia- sitting in a rental car, bus, or taxi- making mental notes. When I arrived, I would spend some time- in a tent or backpacker’s hostel- recording these mental notes. Later, I would sober up and revise what I had written.
So it was that- during a brief respite from the washboard- I began to doze off, and as I did so, I resolved to record my journal in blog form. The next few blogs will be excerpts from my retrospective-through-a-slightly-drunken-haze journal. I have changed the names of people in my journal to protect them and because of how interested they were to see what I would name them. The names of the places are real because I’m too lazy to create an elaborate fantasy world that has roughly the same geographical and political characteristics as Namibia. I will start from the very beginning: Leaving Solwezi