Although this happened a few weeks ago, we still thought that this story is worth telling… 🙂
When entering Namibia on a South African passport, you have to enter the amount of days you would like to spend in Namibia. Upon being faced with this very complicated question Mike, Chris and I decided to answer with 4 weeks. Surely that would be enough time to see and travel through Namibia? And in any case, even if it wasn’t enough, we could just simply extend our visas. Right?
We were having a blast when Mike had to start booking his flight back home. In preparation he was flicking through his passport when he stated that our visas would soon expire. We spent a bit of time discussing whether the airline would let you fly out of the country with an expired visa, when we decided to cut our trip in the north short and to head back to Windhoek.
As we had to head to Windhoek in any case to get the Diff and the oil leaks under control (again!), this wasn’t too much of a change in plans. We thought of using the extra time to get some culture into us by visiting the museums and the history that Windhoek has to offer.
While Chris was happily getting dirty under the car, Mike and I trudged to the town centre and the office of Home Affairs . Mike and I eventually got there footsore, hot and thirsty only to be told that we could gladly extend our visas, but that they would have to approve our extended stay, retaining our passports for three days and that we had to pay a fee of N$ 90,00 (equivalent to R 90,00), as well as an additional fee of N$ 410,00 upon approval of the extended visa. That’s a total of N$ 500,00 per person, for a visa that shouldn’t cost you a cent!
Mike and I were literally speechless! Now we had to make a plan, as none of us had budgeted this amount and we weren’t necessarily inclined to go through the Namibian bureaucracy for something that should be free, simple and straight forward.
So, we phoned Chris in the workshop to find out if we could attempt a border run to Botswana, or if we had to bite the bullet and pay N$ 1.500,00 and wait. We had a bit of luck that day and the car was ready.
Mike and I trudged back to the workshop, loaded Chris into the car, got some Boerie Rolls for lunch and gunned it to the border. We only had a few hours to make it before both our visas expired and the border closed, but we made it!
We had debated turning around immediately again to head back to Windhoek that same evening, but we decided against it on the grounds that we were pissed off at Namibia and wanted to spend a relaxing evening in the Botswana bushveld.
Early the next morning we headed back to the border, filled all the forms out again and made sure that we could stay in Namibia for another two months. We smiled at the officials, got in the car and decided to take the scenic route back to Windhoek.
Along the way, we found out that our various maps were disagreeing with each other and ended up making a detour of a few hours. Just after we had an extremely windy lunch, we hit he road again and almost immediately came across a donkey car
t with a flat tire. We helped them to repair the seriously damaged tube and got them back on the road before a big storm hit. Good deed done for the day, we made it back to Windhoek tired, but very relieved.
The entire round trip from Windkoek, to Botswana and back still turned out to to be cheaper than the visa extensions would have been…
