The travels of Tim and Megan: Africa Safari: Namibia

Day 49: Swakopmund

It was a brilliant sunny morning at Spitzkoppe on Friday. We rose early and packed up our things. We departed Spitzkoppe at 8am and headed south-west. Less than two hours later we found ourselves in Namibia's third largest city, Swakopmund.

Swakopmund is a city on the Atlantic coast of Namibia, 280km west of Windhoek, Namibia's capital. Swakopmund is a beach resort and an example of German colonial architecture. It was founded in 1892 as the main harbour for German South-West Africa and a sizable part of its population is still German-speaking today. Swakopmund is so German that it is easy to forget you are in Africa when you are wandering around town. The city is also known for its extreme sports - something we would be partaking in over the weekend!

Similar to our time in Victoria Falls, our three day stopover in Swakopmund was largely down time - we had the opportunity to do many optional activities if we wanted to, but otherwise we were pretty much left to our own devices. When we arrived in Swakopmund, we had a briefing on the numerous activities available (including fishing, horse-riding, sky diving, aerobatics, quad biking and sand boarding). We signed up for quad biking and sand boarding!

We got a break from camping for a few nights as we were staying at a hostel in the centre of Swakopmund. We checked into a five-bed dorm along with Little Anzac and Tory and Sara. Fun times! Once we were settled, we walked down the street to the supermarket (wondering why it looked like we were in a Bavarian town) to get some cash out and pick up some snacks and drinks. We then enjoyed delicious burgers at the hostel for lunch and chilled out in the sunshine.

At 2.30pm we got picked up and taken to the vast sand dunes just outside of Swakopmund for an afternoon of quad biking. It was exhilarating stuff - there were some seriously steep dunes and we had to hit them really fast, as if you go too slow into an incline, you will run out of puff and risk rolling the bike. The scenery was unreal too - there were just immense sand dunes for literally miles; as far as the eye could see. We all had a blast - it was an incedible two hours of fun and worth every penny.

Back at the quad bike HQ, we got to meet a young macau (a colourful parrot). He posed for photos with us and he even said a few words - great entertainment. We retired to the hostel, had a few drinks in the five-bed dorm (which was the place to be - all the cool kids were there), got changed into our "nice" clothes and headed out for dinner to a place called Napolitana. This was a group dinner for the whole tour group and crew, which was nice. Megs had springbok medallions and Tim had 2kg of beef ribs, both of which were orgasmic. As is usually the case, one arsehole at our table didn't contribute the correct amount so the rest of us had to pay extra to cover the bill for the table. We have a good idea who it was...bloody French.

After dinner, we went through to Napolitana's karaoke bar, which was going off. Megan and Neena requested a song, which did not go down well with some chump, who started whinging his arse off about their song choice. Tim told him to request his own song if he didn't like what others were choosing. The guy then started on some rant about how the music at the bar was always so bad. You would have to ask yourself why he keeps coming back...

Day 50: Swakopmund

We woke early on Saturday and felt terrible (stupid body clock...stupid hangover). Having said that, it was unreal how comfortable the beds in the dorm felt compared to lying on gravel in a tent. After breakfast at the hostel, we got picked up and taken back to the sand dunes, where we had a morning of sand boarding booked in. It was a huge first walk up to the very top of the sand dunes. We were all feeling pretty tired and hungover, especially Neena, so the heat and the trudge uphill in sand was not ideal.

We had opted to do "lying down" sand boarding, which involved lying flat on our stomachs on a piece of plywood and going head first down steep sand dunes, reaching speeds of up to 73km per hour. We got to do six different tracks, although we could do each track as many times as time and energy allowed. Some others opted to do "standing up boarding", which was basically snowboarding but on sand. They were the really soft people of the group, as they reached speeds of up to 15km per hour. The "lying down" boarding was for cool kids.

Our first track was "gentle", but it was still quite scary letting go at the top of the dune. It was such an awesome buzz speeding down the dunes. Two of our group wiped out on their first run but Megs and Tim nailed it. Total pros. You held on to the front of the plywood with your hands and it was crucial to keep that raised up above the ground. If you dropped the front of your board, you would eat sand and wipe out. In that order. So long as you kept the front of your board up, you were sweet. The other thing to remember was that you could not control the direction of the board at all, so if you started to fishtail (swerve about), you had to drop your feet into the sand, so that they dragged lightly in the sand behind you - this would straighten you up again. Easy.

The tracks got quicker and steeper as we went through. On the fourth track, we did a sit-down tandem run. Both Megs and Tim sat on the same board (like a snow sled) and got pushed off at the top of the dune and then cruised down. It was not as fast, but a lot of fun. The 5th track was a super fast steep run - they guides had a radar gun for this run and we all got clocked zooming down the dune. Megs hit 72km per hour, which was the fastest time for a while, until sneaky old Little Anzac hit 73 km per hour. Damn him. Tim's fastest was 71km per hour. That was an amazing rush!

Our final run back down to the vans was intense. There was no speed gun, it was all about distance. One of the guides massively talked himself up, saying he had never been beaten for distance on the final run. Tim was second last to go and had a smoking run that took the lead at that stage. The last few metres he took his hands off the board to do a Ben Tune swallow dive finish - rugby fans know what I'm talking about! The guide was last to go and managed to beat Tim's mark by about half a metre! If not for the swallow dive, Tim would still be basking in glory...oh well.

Back at the vans, we got lunch and cold drinks as part of the package deal. It was incredible value (from memory it was something like $US35 each) and included a few hours of boarding, equipment hire, lunch, drinks, transport to the dunes and back and a DVD of us boarding!!! Get in. Back at the hostel, we took turns showering - the sand got everywhere. Once cleaned up, we wandered into town for a look around, but a lot of shops were shut! We caught up with the news that National had dominated the election, almost grabbing 50% on their own! This made us happy.

Later in the afternoon, Sara (who is actually a hairdresser) gave Megan a haircut and dyed her hair at the hostel in exchange for a bottle of rum - everyone was a winner there. In the evening we watched a bit of English footy in the hostel bar. Man United drew 1-1 with Newcastle, which was very funny, but then Arsenal drew 1-1 with Fulham, which was not funny at all. Tim had KFC for dinner - it was his first Colonel experience in years and it was magical. We had a very early night - everyone was shattered from late nights, drinking, intense heat and adrenalin activities.

Day 51: Swakopmund

Day 51 was a very slow-paced Sunday in Swakopmund. We had a well-earned sleep-in and rose around 8.30am. Freddy, our chef, was AWOL and had no breakfast for us, which was pretty upsetting. Darlington was not happy at all and had strong words with Freddy! We did some laundry at the hostel and walked into town with Little Anzac. Again, hardly anything was open, but we found a street market that was just getting set up. Megs bought a nice bracelet and Tim bought an elegant wooden giraffe. As was usual, we got a bit of hassle, but managed to escape and carried on our walk through the pretty German town centre.

We found an internet cafe, where we loaded photos on to a memory stick, did some emails and caught up on news. It was really nice to have some down time and catch up on all of these admin sort of jobs. Tim couldn't resist the lure of the Colonel for lunch - he just looks so trustworthy. The afternoon was spent relaxing in the sun back at the hostel, chatting to our roomies and having a few quiet drinks. In the evening a few of us went to Spur for dinner. Tim didn't make it to actually eating...we'll call it heatstroke. The others all enjoyed it - it was pretty good food. It was a fun night to end our Swakopmund stint. We would be on the road again tomorrow.

Day 52: Sossusvlei

It was an early start on Monday morning - the beginning of the last week of our African safari. We left the hostel and Swakopmund at 6.30am and drove south on our big orange truck, past Walvis Bay and on towards Sossusvlei. We had a few stops for photos along the way - there were lots of crazy looking trees and amazing landscape shots. We also stopped for a photo at the signpost for the Tropic of Capricorn (it's not every day you cross the Tropic of Capricorn).

We had morning tea in Namibia's smallest town, Solitaire, a great little town right on the edge of the desert. It is home to 12 people, a bakery and a general store. The bakery is run by a man named Moose MacGregor and it is famous for its apple pie. We got a mince pie and an apple pie to share - they were good, but not spectacular. The cool thing about Solitaire is that it is decorated with several old car wrecks and petrol bowsers and the like, which look great scattered amongst the sandy land and the odd cactus (photo below). Apparently there are quite a few movies filmed in the area and some of the car wrecks have been left behind from movie sets.

We drove on into the Namib-Nakluft National Park (desert) and towards our camp for the night at Sesriem. We got settled in at the camp and had sandwiches for lunch before setting off for Sossusvlei and the world famous Namibian sand dunes. We had to get off the truck and drive the last 5km in 4WD jeeps because the road ends and is replaced by heavy soft sand, which the truck cannot cope with. Our afternoon adventure included a walk in the desert, over some smallish sand dunes to visit Deadvlei and Sossusvlei.

Sossusvlei is a salt and clay pan surrounded by high red dunes, located in the southern part of the Namib Desert, in the Namib-Nakluft National Park. The name "Sossusvlei" is often used in an extended meaning to refer to the surrounding area (including other neighbouring vleis such as Deadvlei and other high dunes), which is one of the major visitor attractions of Namibia.

Our first stop was Deadvlei, a clay pan, about 2 km from the actual Sossusvlei. A notable feature of Deadvlei is that it used to be an oasis with several acacia trees. However, the river that watered the oasis changed its course. The pan is now punctuated by blackened, dead acacia trees, in vivid contrast to the shiny white of the salty floor of the pan and the intense orange of the dunes. This creates a particularly fascinating and surrealistic landscape, that appears in uncountable pictures and that has been used as a setting for films and videos. We wandered around Deadvlei and took lots of photos - it really was beautiful and unlike anything we had ever seen.

Just a couple of kilometres away is the actual Sossusvlei (which roughly translates to "dead end marsh"). Sossusvlei is a clay pan, of roughly elliptical shape, covered in a crust of salt-rich sand. While the pan has been shaped over time by the Tsauchab river, the actual flooding of the pan is a relatively rare event, and sometimes several years pass between one flood and the next. The river is dry most of the year, and even when it is not, it carries relatively little water to the vlei. It actually looked like there had been a bit of water at Sossusvlei recently, as the edge of the pan looked quite soft and muddy.

After visiting the vleis and running around on the surrounding dunes, we took the 4WD jeeps and then the truck back to the big-boy sand dunes. There are literally dozens of gigantic sand dunes lined up like soldiers on either side of the road that runs from Sesriem to the Sossusvlei area. These colossal sand dunes are the largest and most famous in the world.

The most famous of all of these sand dunes is known as Dune 45! It is so named as it lies 45km from Sesriem on the road to Sossusvlei. Standing over 170m, it is composed of 5 million year old sand that is accumulated by the Orange River from the Kalahari Desert and then blown there. Dune 45 is also known as "the most photographed dune in the world" - because of its unusually simple and fascinating shape, and its proximity to the road that makes it convenient for visitors to stop by and take pictures. Some of our group chose to climb Dune 45, but it was quite windy and we were feeling knackered, so we stayed at the bottom and took cracking photos instead.

Back at camp, we had drinks and dinner as we watched the sun set over the distant hills. We had showers after dinner - they were brilliant showers too. Strong water pressure and plenty of hot water! Ahhh.

Day 53: Fish River Canyon

On Tuesday we got up at 5.45am and left camp at 7am, as we had a decent enough drive ahead of us. It was a cool start to the morning, but it got very hot very quickly. The scenery was superb as we drove south - hundreds of rugged mountains rising up out of flat arid plains.

We stopped in a little town called Bethanie to fill the truck with diesel and pick up a few supplies. While there, we discovered the truck had a puncture, so we were delayed by almost an hour while the crew sorted that out. With extra time on our hands, we wandered down the road to a butchery that sold biltong (a southern African delight, much like beef jerky but with a bit of heat). We got a particular type of biltong called "chilli bites", which were little bite-sized strips and rather spicy. They were amazing.

Once the puncture was repaired, we carried on a short distance and stopped for lunch - egg salad and bread. After lunch we carried on. It was uncomfortably hot in the truck - there was hot air blowing in through the open windows. The scenery was pleasant though. We arrived at our camp at 4.15pm. It was a really nice camp called Canyon Roadhouse. It had a swimming pool and a great bar/restaurant decorated with old cars and petrol station/workshop type paraphernalia. Out the front of the camp there was an old-school windmill and a car wreck, similar to those in Solitaire. The facilities were excellent too - very modern bathrooms! However, drinks in the bar were really expensive and the service was awful.

At 5.30pm, we hopped in the truck and drove about 25km down the road to the Fish River Canyon. Fish River Canyon, located in the south of Namibia, is the second largest canyon in the world (after the Grand Canyon) and the largest in Africa, as well as the second most visited tourist attraction in Namibia. It features a gigantic ravine, in total about 160km long, up to 27km wide and in places almost 550 metres deep. The Fish River is the longest interior river in Namibia. It cuts deep into the plateau which is today dry, stony and sparsely covered with hardy drought-resistant plants. The river flows intermittently, usually flooding in late summer; the rest of the year it becomes a chain of long narrow pools.

The view over the canyon was absolutely breath-taking. We walked along the edge of the canyon for about 30 minutes, taking plenty of photos as we went, and then we sat in a tourist look-out station and watched the sun set over the canyon. It was so beautiful.

Back at camp we had delicious bratwurst sausages, pumpkin and potatoes for dinner. A few of us went to the bar and asked them to play the football on TV, but they refused, so we kept our money in our pockets and went back to our respective tents and had an early night. Not good business sense by the bar really... Our last night in Namibia was very windy - it felt like the tent might blow away at one point, but we managed to survive the night! Tomorrow we would cross the border into South Africa!