Nothing but time

A lot of thought went into this decision. First, my grandfather had passed away a few days before and he loved trains as a way of transportation. I thought it would be my way of saying goodbye or to honor his memory, or even my own type of remembrance since I would not be at the funeral. Second, I’m terrified to ride in cars in Namibia. Seriously I get an anxiety attack when I’m in them. Third, my hospital said to leave early cause I wasn’t my normal bubbly self since my grandfather’s passing and there wasn’t much for me to do at work. So in the end, I boarded the train from Otjiwarongo to Windhoek, a mere 300km distance.
No shocker the train was late. Real late. After my fellow PCV and I boarded the train we quickly got situated foolishly thinking we would be leaving soon. Three hours later we had fallen asleep. Well into the night I finally felt our train move, oh false alarm we only moved back and forth on the tracks in the train station for a few more hours. Once we finally got moving I couldn’t sleep because I thought the train was going to jump off the tracks, seriously I didn’t know trains made those movements or noises, I was so scared. Somehow throughout the night and morning I nodded in and out of a semi-awake sleep. Sometimes I would only sleep when the train wasn’t moving (which happened a lot). Around 7am we awoke and the train wasn’t moving. We were supposed to arrive in Windhoek at 6am so I was a little concerned. I could tell by the mountain range we were not anywhere near Windhoek and I was more concerned when at first not a single person on the train seemed to be moving, what was going on? Two hours later someone informed us that the driver had been off the clock around 7 so he stopped the train and got off and we were waiting for another driver to show up, we were somewhere in between Okahandja and Karibib. When finally arriving in Okahandja I was hopeful that we’d be leaving to Windhoek since there were no passengers and we were already way behind schedule. For thirty to forty-five minutes we moved back as forth on the same tracks in the station and then eventually made our way to Windhoek.
As we approached the Windhoek station all the workers were laughing and waving yelling, “Oh, just a little late” or “It’s about time”. We again did the back and forth thing in the Windhoek station and then around 1pm finally departed the train station. The whole adventure took about 18 hours to travel a distance that can be done in 3 hours in a car. In the end I decided that we had moved backwards more than we had moved forward and we had also been stopped more than we were moving. Oh TransNamib…well I guess it’s fine when you are like me and have nothing but time but thank goodness my parent’s had rented a car.