DAY 210 - 215: Luderitz to Wellington

How ridiculous is this?
I booked my ticket with Air Namibia from Lüderitz to Windhoek in April 2018. Flight SW146 leaving at 2:05 on Sunday 2/12/18. I show up at the airport at 1pm on the day as per their instructions, to find their only flight for the day, flight SW143 chocka full and ready to take off a whole hour earlier. No flight SW146.... that flight has been cancelled.... without letting me and another German man know. The original flight and our bookings were however still visible online!!!!
Problem is, the next flight out of town is the next day (Monday) and I would miss my Quatar flight from Windhoek to Doha. The next Quatar flight out of Windhoek leaves on Wednesday, getting me home on Friday, 2 days late!

So on Monday morning I get to the Air Namibia office bright and early… no problem. They issue me with a new ticket for the same day from Luderitz to Windhoek. They also assure me they have organised for me to be picked up from the airport and taken into Windhoek where I am being put up for 2 nights at a hotel in the CBD. All I had to do is to check in at the Air Namibia desk at the airport. In the mean time they were still busy trying to rebook my Qatar flight.

So I say my good byes and off I went only to get to Windhoek airport and the girl at the Air Namibia counter has never heard about me or my plight! So I start again trying to explain. Eventually she gets the ok and books me into a hotel – outside the city!! And she organises a driver to take me. 4 hours after I landed, I was at the hotel.

Early Tuesday morning I rang the Luderitz office… they still have not managed to rebook me on Qatar. So I catch a shuttle into the CBD and walk 5 km to their head office. There I wait a very long time until someone from their customer care dep. eventually shows up to talk to me. So, long story short: they had installed a new computer system 3 years earlier and the staff still cannot get their heads around what they need to do when they replace one flight with another! And, I just have to wait until the man in Luderitz figures out how to rebook me. Seething I was! Luckily my Maass-family in Windhoek had invited me for a BBQ and picked me up at 5pm.

I get back at 9pm to find an email from the Luderitz office: “Sorry but we cannot rebook you. You need to do that yourself and claim it back from your own insurance!” By now my original flight was nearly in Wellington, so no way to change the ticket. 10 minutes later I had booked a brand new ticket online and was ready to leave the next day – 2 days later than planned!

Wonderful you say? Problem solved you say? Yeah nah….not so. Wednesday morning I get to the airport fine and everything works well. Even managed to organise a window seat. And then I show up at immigration and the yelling starts. In all this confusion I had never thought to look at my passport. Turns out they had, at arrival, put a visa stamp in my passport, with a departure date…. which had now passed. I was officially an over-stayer…. in my own country of birth! And this woman gets ruder and ruder and yells louder and louder! In the end I said to her that the fact that I was born there surely counts for something. No, she says, YOU ARE NOT A CITIZEN. Oh but I actually am, I said. No, she says, you cannot prove that you are a citizen. Oh but I can, I said and showed her my brand new ID (the one Heinz made me pick up in Keetmans). Speechless she was! Oh, she says, that makes you a dual citizen. And then someone from Qatar shows up asking if she is going to let me fly because they want to close the doors and need to know if they need to take my luggage out. You can imagine how close to tears I was. So she says yes, but next time I must tell immigration when arrive that I am a dual citizen. And with a few more stern words she let me go.

Honestly, where do you begin? 7 months of trouble-free travel and the last leg turns into this...

I arrived back in New Zealand on Friday after 29 hours of flying, never mind all the time wasted at airports - to very beautiful weather. I was exhausted but in one piece and for once not sick due to one good piece of advice I got on this trip: Forget Vitamin C...… take Zinc! It boosts the immune system to such a degree that I managed to NOT pick up any coodies on the plane. First time ever!

Cannot wait to start planning my next trip.