Namibia – part 1

Meghan and I are sitting in an Internet Cafe here in Windhoek checking in on the world before we depart for Botswana.

We’ve been spending the last few days exploring Namibia – and it has been quite an adventure.

We arrived in Windhoek a mere 5 days ago but it feels like we’ve been here for longer than that.  After landing and clearing passport control we again hopped in our rental car – this time a Toyota Camry.  Driving out from the airport – no – even before we landed you could see that the terrain had changed dramatically from Cape Town.  We were clearly in the desert.

The drive in from the airport to Windhoek was bizarre.  The road was completely empty – not only of cars but of roadside activity like houses, shops.. anything.  We felt like we were in the middle of nowhere and that was reinforced by the baboons that we saw climbing a wire fence on the side of the road – baboons!

We didn’t stay in Windhoek but instead continued straight through to the coast out to the town of Swakopmund.  This seaside town is “more German than Germany” they say, and there’s something to that.  The town is quaint but in the off season it is strangely empty of foot or vehicular traffic.

Swakopmund is the new ‘adventure capitol’ of this part of Africa and as evidence you can do just about any kind of crazy activity especially if it involves sand.  This part of Namibia is really dry with the dunes running right into the ocean, except at Swakopmund where they’ve piped and pumped in enough water to maintain the town.

Unfortunately, Meghan and I were both feeling a little under the weather (its this cough that we can’t lose) so we weren’t up for any adventure too large but we did both start taking antibiotics to fight off what we have.  We did however check out a large flamingo population in Walvis Bay and we also rode ATVs around in the dunes for a little while and we capped off our stay with a hike up the dunes for a sunset chug from a bottle of S. African wine.

The Namib desert and the Trans-Kalahari drive out to Swakopmund were awesome, but there was something about Swakopmund that didn’t really excite either one of us – it’s hard to put our fingers on it just yet but I think in time we’ll be able to develop our thoughts a little more.

I’ll break the Namib adventures into two posts to keep these things a little reasonable.. Stay tuned for the continuation of our Namibian travels.

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