37 Frames✈️ Windhoek → Johannesburg
The Last Morning
The alarm struck at 4:45am like a betrayal. Our last sunrise in Africa was still tucked beneath the horizon, the city of Windhoek asleep around us.
We were ready. Bags packed, camera gear zipped, hearts full. But the carpark had other plans. The exit gate wouldn’t open. Locked in.
A half-panic, half-pantomime scramble followed. Back to reception. No one in sight. Namibia, we love you, but your hospitality slept in. Eventually, we found some hotel staff. Then someone else. Then… emerging like a character from a Hemingway short story… a parking attendant appeared, bleary-eyed but with a smile. With the sheer force of will and maybe magic, he wrenched the gate open.
We were free.
Windhoek slipped behind us in the dark, the road to the airport stretching out like one final unknown. We got lost on the roundabout, naturally. Went around it 5 times. The rental car return was signed with all the clarity of a riddle, but eventually… after what felt like a scene from National Lampoon’s Desert Vacation… we found it. Keys returned. Exhale.
And just like that, it was over.
We watched the Namibian landscape disappear beneath us as the plane lifted into the sky. Still golden. Still grand. Still calling us back.
The Unofficial Debrief
At some point … always … there’s the debrief. Usually over coffee. Or a cocktail. Or in a security line.
We laughed about…
- The meltdown in the sand at Deadvlei
- The ostrich still in love with Dee
- The very questionable bathroom stops
- The magic hour light that made everything look like a movie
- That one flamingo that posed like a model
But we also talked about the real stuff…
- How much space we made for joy
- How long we’ve been carrying stress
- How good it felt to feel free
- How we want to carry that freedom forward
Is There Such a Thing as “Back to Normal”?
Here’s the truth: Trips like this don’t have a tidy “end.” You don’t just fly home and resume. Not if you’re paying attention.
Something always stays. And something always shifts. The you that returns? They’re wiser. Quieter. Less impressed by chaos. More in love with the world. And maybe, a little more in love with people, too.
At the Edge of Africa, Between Departures and Arrivals
Now, we sit in Johannesburg. Seven hours between flights. Somewhere between toast and turbulence.
Airports are strange places. Gateways between worlds, between versions of ourselves. And today, sitting at the edge of Africa, between boarding calls and boarding passes, we’re caught in that familiar liminal space… no longer there, not yet home.
The dust of Namibia still clings to us. In our clothes. In our bones. In the stories now etched into our memory, still too big to hold all at once.
There’s something about Namibia that cracks you open. Maybe it’s the light. Maybe it’s the silence. Maybe it’s the sheer space … how much of it there is, and how it makes you feel simultaneously both small and essential.
We don’t know if it’s because we’re Australian, or just deeply sentimental, but we understand the ones who fell for this land and never left. Who endured heat and hardship and chose Africa anyway. Because when you love the land… really love it…. its wildness becomes a kind of home.
The landscapes flash by behind closed eyelids. That impossible light. The silent dunes. The shapes of giraffes.. The thunder of hooves and the soft thread of conversations with strangers who somehow became friends.
And the wild, pulsing truth of it all: that life is unpredictable, imperfect, and deeply magnificent.
From Precision to Presence
Namibia was the opposite of everything we know in Japan. Wild instead of precise. Dusty instead of polished. Unscheduled instead of perfectly timed.
And yet, we need both. One to tether us, one to unmake us. One to teach grace. The other, surrender.
That’s the real souvenir.
As we step onto the plane tonight, we’re already thinking of our next wedding in Japan, but we’re now carrying this stillness with us. This wild contrast.
The knowing that we are part of something vast and beautiful. And that maybe, just maybe, the more we roam, the more we remember who we really are.
And so we wait here, somewhere between boarding calls, with the stories still settling and the next chapter already calling.
We’ll be back. The Skeleton Coast is waiting.
Thank you Namibia. It was everything.
37 Frames
