Exploring Southern Namibia

Driving on to Swakopmund and our hostel, Gruner Kranz. On arriving in Swakopmund, I have to say, it is a very odd town, I’m not sure if it’s because it is the most westernised town I’ve seen in a while, or if it’s the mix between German and African, bang in the middle of the desert. We arrived on a Saturday afternoon and almost everything was closed till Monday morning… One thing that was open was the adventure activities centre!

In the morning we drove out of Swakopmund (and immediately left the wall of cloud (and cold) behind) to the sand dunes, where we went stand up sand boarding, much like snowboarding, but your feet feel much heavier and you have to lean back a lot more to stop your tip digging into the sand. Then we had a go at lie down sand boarding, basically lying facedown on a piece of waxed plyboard, hurtling head first down the sand dunes! My fastest run was 66km hr, the fastest that day was 76 km hr!! The fastest ever has been 80 km hr!!! But each day is different as the sand dunes move and the run is never the same. Difference here being, there are no tows to whisk you back to the top, lots of walking up the dunes after every run.

In the afternoon we jumped on quad bikes and headed out into the dunes again. Once I’d gotten over the fear of riding a quad bike for the first time, I was whizzing about the dunes at full throttle! Taking an interesting direction “off road” at times and fishtailing round corners. We were out for an hour and seemed to cover quite a distance, the landscape of the dunes was just amazing, such smooth rolling lines and undulating, sloping ground, it was so much fun!

Onwards inland a bit through the Namib-Naukluft Park, we passed Kuiseb Canyon, which stretched for miles, just a sandy river bed as no water was running through it at this time of year, then we went over the Kuiseb Pass and Gaubb Pass before stopping for lunch on the Tropic of Caprciron. We stopped at a rest stop in Solitare, where we had the most delicious apple crumble! We arrived at our camp in Sesriem, the only campground within the 32,000 sq km park. We were up early to visit Dune 45, so called because it is 45km from Sesriem, its 150m in height, but running up it to get a good spot for sunrise is harder than you might think! After sunrise on the dune and breakfast at the foot of it, we drove a further 20km to Sousevlei, we had a half hour walk through more sand and pink dunes to a pan surrounded by dunes reaching 300m in height, in the pan there are lots of dead trees trunks, giving great silhouettes and shadows on the cracked mud ground, the colours here were beautiful!

We had a long straight drive south, towards the South African border, we stopped off at Fish River Canyon and took a walk along the canyon rim. Fish River Canyon is second only in size to the Grand Canyon, it is 160km long, 27km wide and 550m deep, it late in the day and the colours of the canyon were pink and dusty orange. Our camp for the night was at Ai-Ais Hot Springs, sitting beneath the mountains at the southern end of Fish River Canyon, there was an outdoor swimming pool which had been filled with the hot water from the springs, it was a lovely way to start the next day, with a dip in the pool.