Everything takes much longer than one would imagine over here. As an example, let me share with you today’s task, which was to organise a 4×4 camping-car for an imminent tour of Namibia. We are currently in Botswana, the car-hire firm is based in Namibia, next door.

Our mobile phone does not work in Botswana and we’re only here for a couple more days, so we decided not to buy a Botswana SIM card. We’ve been told that the reception in this town is patchy anyway. Instead, we’ll be using our Skype Internet phone from what is definitely the fastest Internet cafe that we’ve had the good fortune of finding right here in Maun.

It’s already taken three hours of poor-quality, often dropped, Internet calls to get from having the phone number of the car-hire company to receiving a quote for the hire. Unfortunately, the received quote had a number of critical errors. Like the number of people, the vehicle, the start date, end date and price. It took a further two hours to get the quote completely corrected. All I needed to do now was print-out and complete the attached credit-card deposit form and fax it back to confirm the reservation. Except the form wasn’t attached.

After more tooing-and-frowing, the form arrived in my inbox and we hit the print button. Except the printer was was out of ink. The other one was broken too. I infiltrated the office upstairs with a USB key to use their ink. No paper. Got some paper. Bingo! We printed; only a single-page fax stood in between me and the car.

Unfortunately, the fax machine hadn’t worked since it was struck by lightening so I took to the streets, paper in hand, to seek-out a person with a facsimile machine. Anika Rice would have been proud of me as I burst through the door of the nearby business centre, nearly accidentally knocking the manager on the floor. I pleaded with him to send our fax and stressed that the hire-car office closed in five minutes. I handed him the sheet and pointed-out the fax number. Instead of springing into action, he gazed down at the paper and began to slowly familiarise himself with the finer details of my car-hire agreement. Like a crazed time-challenge gameshow contestant I retook the paper and started to punch the numbers into his machine myself.

It’s taken almost a complete working day to organise a hire-car, but at least we’ve got one now. I think…