Vacation Part 3 - Buses and Borders

There is definitely something much more comforting about flying across borders than busing; I realized this after spending countless hours on a buses in Southern Africa and crossing borders overland 3 times. The first bus taken was from Cape Town to Windhoek (the capital of Namibia), the company was called Intercape and don't get me wrong, the bus itself was really nice. It was the Intercape "Sleepliner" meaning that is was a double decker bus, with a toilet, seats that reclined 150 degrees and extra leg room.

The problem came when we arrived to cross the South Africa border into Namibia around 8pm...the whole ordeal took around 2 hours.We all got off the bus with our passports and headed to immigration to get the stamp of approval to leave the country, that was the easy part. Then we were told that if we had any hand luggage on the bus to remove it to be inspected. So the 50 odd people on the bus all lined up outside in the cold while the immigration police stood on their platform looking down at us while rummaging through our hand luggage (insert security check at airports here!). I found the whole process to be rather invasive, especially when the lady opened every single sipper in my purse, pulling out tampons in front of everyone and asking, "what is this?" ... As if she didn't know!

After everyone had their hand luggage inspected they proceeded to open the cargo, pulled out everyone's suitcases and bags and rummaged through those as well. The only thing that was "confiscated" was someone's swiss army knife but I have a feeling that the immigration inspector was fascinated by it and wanted to keep it for himself. After about an hour of this process, I think the inspectors were getting lazy. My bag was in the back of the cargo so by the time it came out for inspection the lady just opened it and  had a quick feel for anything sharp.

Finally we boarded the bus again and drove to the Namibia side of the border and waiting in line again to hand in our arrival cards and get our passports stamped. Finally around 10pm we were all officially allowed into the country and heading to the capital, Windhoek; arrival time 7:00am

There was one other long bus ride and 2 other border crossings involved in my journey and this was on my trip back to South Africa -- Johannesburg, as that was where my flight back to Dar was departing from. This bus, unfortunately, wasn't a "Sleepliner" bus but just your regular single decker, toilet included "Greyhound" type of bus. Still much better than what you would expect to travel on in Africa! The bus departed Namibia at 3:00pm, crossed the border into Botswana sometime early in the evening then crossed from Botswana to South Africa the next morning around 8:00am. These 2 border crossings put together didn't even amount to the trouble we had the first time. Both of these crossing were very smooth sailing, thankfully!

I ended covering a lot of ground in Southern Africa....