37 Frames✈️ Brisbane → Sydney → Johannesburg → Windhoek
📍 Arrival in Namibia
Some Trips Don’t Start When You Land
They begin the moment you say yes. To the trip. To the time off. To that yearly decision that you’re finally going to stop, step away to recharge, and go. Even if you know there’s never a right time.
30+ hours. Three flights. One new continent. And a blur of airports, headphone cords, and a multitude of bad coffees later… we landed.
Windhoek. Namibia. A name that already sounds like wind and wildness. And just like that, the pace of life changed.
Because there’s something that happens when you arrive somewhere that far away. Your body stops running on deadlines. Your brain lets go of browser tabs. Your breath deepens, and so does your sense of self. But, our brains are still wired to work. Still checking for emails, editing timelines in our heads, narrating the moment instead of living it. It’ll take time. We know. That’s the real challenge… learning to let go slowly. So for now, we’re in that in-between state. Physically here. Mentally… still catching up. But soon. We feel it. The exhale is coming.
We picked up the rental car, plugged in the playlist, and naturally… blasted Toto’s Africa as the road opened up before us. We didn’t even pretend to be cool about it. Cliche? Yes. But necessary… absolutely.
Our hotel? It’s on Michael Scott Street. Which feels far too poetic for two tired ‘Office’ superfans navigating life on a new continent.
And yes, we’re still wrapping our heads around this: We’re in Africa.
The Philosophy of Airports: We Begin
We live in Tokyo. A city that never whispers. It hums, pulses, insists. Where even the quiet moments have a commuter soundtrack.
We didn’t realize how tightly we’d been wound until we hit the third security check and couldn’t remember if we still had our passports. (Spoiler: we did. Barely. Mainly because we were obsessed with the immigration officer wearing a huge hat that said “NOT ECCENTRIC” even though it was one of the most eccentric things we’d seen in a long time.) Then Dee said “Airports are laboratories for human behavior under stress and fluorescent lighting.” And we laughed a little before feeling stressed again.
But the reality is that airports are also temples of possibility. Every departure board is a poem written in destinations. Each gate a portal to a different version of your story.
An airport is a place where the ordinary world releases its grip and adventure begins. There’s something about the quality of exhaustion that makes philosophical thoughts feel accessible right now 😉
Packing was (organized) chaos. Checklists were rewritten mid-flight. One of us cried over an airline desert. The other tried to finish the last of client edits between flights. We were frayed, sleep-deprived, running on instinct and protein bars.
And then… the upgrade. Business class from Sydney to Johannesburg. Fourteen hours of horizontal hope. Gin and tonics and champagne on call.
A win for the weary. And a reminder that sometimes, magic shows up when you’re not in control. For once, we said yes to rest. Yes to silence. Yes to trusting that the world could spin without us for a while.
And somewhere over the Indian Ocean, we started to arrive.
The Art of the Arrival
There are days when travel is about doing. Booking. Packing. Checking in. Navigating. Landing.
But Day 1 isn’t about doing. It’s about arriving. And we don’t just mean stepping off the plane. We mean the real arrival. When your internal world catches up with your physical one. When your mind stops racing long enough to notice the shape of the trees. The texture of the light. The scent of something unfamiliar.
That kind of arrival? It takes time. It takes silence. It takes saying: “Okay. I’m here.”
And trusting that everything else — the work, the weddings, the to-do list that could crush a small village — will be fine.
The Myth of Rest (Unpacked Gently in Windhoek)
They say rest is the absence of doing. A pause. A blank space between the productive parts.
But here, in this quiet Windhoek hotel rooftop bar, watching our first African sunset… the light spilling over strange rooftops… we’re realizing that rest isn’t nothing. It’s something. A deliberate, almost radical act. A full-bodied exhale in a world obsessed with inhale.
For people like us – whose lives revolve around noticing moments, capturing meaning, turning experience into something others can hold – this kind of rest doesn’t come naturally. Not reaching for the camera. Not documenting the exact shade of afternoon. Not immediately translating every feeling into a caption.
It’s hard. Like learning to see in a new color.
And yes – the irony is glaring. Here we are writing about rest. Sharing it. Framing it. Turning the moment into content even as we try to step away from content.
But maybe that’s the quiet truth: rest doesn’t mean silencing the impulse to create. It just means changing the intention. Creating for ourselves. Witnessing for no one else. Letting presence be enough.
This isn’t the absence of doing. It’s the presence of being.
And maybe, in that stillness, we’re beginning to remember who we are when the world stops asking anything of us.
What We Carried In
Let’s be honest. We didn’t come into this light.
We came in carrying:
- Laptops with work still waiting for us
- Sore shoulders from the weight of cameras
- The gentle anxiety that maybe, just maybe, switching off will be harder than we thought
But we also came in carrying:
- Curiosity
- Hope
- A shared determination to be present
- And each other (which is kind of the whole point, right?)
Windhoek: The Soft Launch
Windhoek isn’t the main event. It’s the overture.
It’s the clean hotel bed after 36 hours of travel. It’s the first local beer. It’s the clumsy attempt at pronouncing something in Afrikaans and getting a smile in return. It’s that moment in the car when you look out the window and think: “I have no idea what I’m looking at… but I’m in love with it already.”
That’s Windhoek. And that’s how we began.
A Note to the Overachievers (You Know Who You Are)
If you’re the kind of person who likes to squeeze productivity out of every moment… First of all, same. But also: this is your reminder that rest is not indulgent. It’s necessary.
Switching off doesn’t mean you care less. It means you care enough to last longer. To come back better. To keep creating without burning out.
Our brains and creativity are our livelihood. But they need sunlight, silence, and strangeness to thrive.
This Isn’t a Break. It’s a Beginning.
Day 1 wasn’t flashy. There were no wild animals. No golden dunes. No iconic shots.
Just two slightly delirious humans landing in a country that already feels like it’s going to change us. And that’s what matters.
Because maybe the most important journeys don’t begin with an itinerary. They begin with a feeling.
“Let’s meet the world gently.”
And so, here we are.
The Cartography of Tomorrow:
Namibia is about to unfold. Slowly. Wildly. One dusty, glowing kilometer at a time.
We’ll be:
- Chasing sunrise in ghost towns
- Floating in hot air balloons over red dunes
- Listening to lions at night
- And letting the road rewrite us
But today? We unpacked. We exhaled. We landed.
And that’s enough.
37 Frames
