We’ve been in sub-Saharan Africa for nearly three months now and have never been out at night later than about 9 o’clock. In fact, we’ve only been out later than sunset (between 5:30-7:30pm at this time of year, depending on country/timezone) once or twice. Swakopmund is a really nice seaside town. Our guidebook describes it as being more German than Germany. (Namibia is a former German colony.)

After taking advice from our friendly campsite reception staff, Squiffy and I ventured out after sunset to eat at one of the many fine tourist restaurants. The walk from the campsite to our chosen restaurant was just fifteen minutes and, in a safe town, surely not worth taking a taxi for (and not that we saw any if we did want one)?

On the way to the Italian, we noticed how romantically empty the misty streets were. We listened to the waves of the ocean lap onto the beach. We had a fine meal at the Italian, which in stark contrast to the empty streets, was absolutely packed with people eating, drinking, cavorting.

The walk home was unfortunately a different story. My dear Mum called on our mobile phone and, given that it’s not often we get to successfully connect a calls, I picked-up. Even in London, I’ve become a bit weary of conducting a public mobile phone conversation at night and usually try to avoid it. Just one street away from the restaurant, we passed a stationary man, standing between a wall and a bus. He was wearing a ballaclava, which was not massively unreasonable, given the temperature. I should point out at this stage, that it’s quite normal to see men standing still outside buildings and even buses in the parts of Africa that we’ve travelled. These men are in fact security guards. I made clear eye contact with the man and said hello as I passed. He met my eyes, raised his eyebrows and said nothing. Again, not so weird as not everyone can speak English here.

Even before we passed him, both of our Spidy-sensors were on high-alert. About 25 metres after we passed the silent, still, balaclavaed man, he started to run for us. Squiffy noticed a split second before me and shouted “he’s running at us”. I turned around and, true, he was indeed running at us. I pulled her across to the road, to test whether he was indeed running for us and told my Mum to call back in 20 minutes. As glorious luck would have it, a carload of Italian tourists came around the corner. We jumped in front of the car and pleaded with them to give us a lift to the end of the road. Meanwhile, our would-be attacker immediately slowed his sprint back into a walk and disappeared into another street.

One can only imagine that he was either planning to snatch only the mobile phone or my initial ‘hello’ eye contact threw him at first — otherwise why would he have waited until we had passed him before beginning his charge?

A big thanks to the Italians who actually drove us all the way back to our campsite. We were a little shaken, but not stirred. Lesson learnt: Swakopmund, beautiful as it is, is probably not safe to walk at night — drive, get a cab or walk in larger groups. At least don’t yap on the telephone on a dark street like I did!