Recovery Optimism
2020 has delivered quite a blow to the economy of every country in the world, and recovery has been very slow. Being always the optimist and seeing signs of recovery here and there.. but always there was something knocking back the recovery somewhat. There were a couple of locals that needed a tour, and of course they were helped… but locals don’t carry around the same kind of money that international tourists do.
We simply won’t have a proper recovery until the rest of the world has recovered.
Some tour operators were even working below cost, just to keep food on the table, but no idea what that did to their maintenance plans. I guess time will tell. Maintenance on Awesome Chapters’ vehicles was an ongoing matter, with small things breaking the whole time, even though the vehicles were hardly used.
It’s been a while since the last blog post, thanks for your patience while waiting! Finally some work came in on the film services side, and this has been a life saver. While working on film permits and park permits and all the other nitty gritty things that allows a film to be made in Namibia, some tours came in as well, and even some rentals of our equipment happened! Indeed, it’s been a good month.
Then, my old employer contacted me for another trip on a Seismic Research vessel. It just so happens that the tourism bit has not recovered enough to demand my close attention just now, and so it’s an opportunity that I am definitely taking! There will no doubt be some loose work coming my way during the trip, but the people here will just have to manage without my physically being present. I’ll support as best as I can from the other side of the world, of course!
Work
So, what’s been keeping me so busy that I have not had an opportunity to write the blog? Well, two teams decided that they want to shoot documentaries right after another. Setting up all the paperwork with the NFC was time consuming as usual, and the work visa process was especially troublesome this time around.
When the time came for actually being on production, things were far nicer. With the first group, I managed to snag some awesome footage of wild animals in Etosha, and a bit of the Mokuti lodge.
The second team was in Swakopmund and the surroundings, and while they were a lot of fun, I really did not get any footage worth making a movie clip out of. There was a visit to the EHRA, which was awesome, but the mozzies was killer. I still had bumps weeks later!
Images posted to Social Media
