Namibia 20/1/2005
The drive from etosha took us down the desolate skeleton coast to the town of Swakopmund. Swakopmund was a great activity town, it was a playground. After taking time to look around the town which really did remind me of Torquay for some reason – I think it was the grey sea and the palm trees, we had a great meal out and a few drinks to prepare us for the next few days. The first on our list was sandboarding, which was basically snowboarding on sand. It didn’t hurt as much as snowboarding whne you fell over but it was harder to turn because the sand was so heavy. The other real difference was the heat. Walking up the side of a 100m sand dune in the desert heat was a real killer, especially wearing snow board boots and carrying your board. We were rewarded with free beer though, and it can’t have been that bad because I did it two days in row! After the sandboarding came quadbiking through the sand dunes. It was amazing being out there on a quad riding up and down on some pretty steep dunes, and some jumps too! When we were in Swakopmund Dave had his thirtieth birthday, which obviously required a party. Dave managed to eat two full racks of ribs and a chips and his salad, quite an achievement for anyone but spectacular for someone as skinny as Dave! After that we had to do some drinking, you know, it would have been rude not to!
Taking ourselves and our hangovers from Swakopmund we headed for the Namib Naukluft desert and some even bigger sand dunes. The highlight of our time in the sand had to be watching the sun go down from the top of Dune 45, so named because it is the 45th dune they counted. The views from the dune were really something and the sand turned such a rich shade of red as the sun dipped below the horizon. The photo of us on the intro page, that’s dune 45.
Our last stop in Namibia was Fish River Canyon, the second largest canyon in the world after the Grand Canyon in the US. It was pretty big. We had dinner on the canyon rim after a brief hike around the edge of it. The canyon has very little water now but it’s legacy has left a massive cleft in the landscape, a cleft that was to be our final image of Namibia
Mark 2/3/05
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