The Namibian Seaside
We left Sisriem early knowing that we had 316km to travel on gravel roads before we arrived in Walvis Bay. The roads began very rough with lots of ruts meaning the car would reverberate horrendously when doing any speed over 20 km/h. After a couple of hours of this the roads began to improve a little and we even had a couple of sightings of some ostriches and oryx. The scenery was quite varied with some interesting hills, grassy plains and dried up river valleys. We also passed into the Tropic of Capricorn!
The last 2 hours we spend travelling through pinkish desert which seemed to go on forever until we eventually popped out into Walvis Bay. The drive took 6 hours which is quite a bit longer than googles estimated 4.
The Lonely Planet guide recommends a place called Bird Paradise, we tried to find this but it seemed that this was now permanently shut and we almost ended up in the town’s sewage works. The main reason for trying to find this was the large flocks of flamingos. However I was pleased to find that you could actually see these all along the lagoon (beach front). We decided to take a drive along the lagoon and found this was the location of the salt works where 90% of South Africa's salt is produced.
After watching the flamingos in the distance for a while we headed to our hostel. We dropped our stuff and decided to head out for a couple of drinks and some dinner. After wondering around for a bit we discovered there really was only one bar/restaurant. Luckily it was the place I had been looking at online. The bar is a wooden shack on stilts off the beach, it has a real Robinson Crusoe feel about it. We managed to kill a couple of hours until sunset and were treated with an amazing view complete with pelican bobbing past.
After some googling I deduced that to get a better view of the flamingos I needed to get to the beach for high tide, therefore i got up at 6am and walked 5km along the promenade (Olly stayed in bed). I was a little disheartened as i only saw a single flamingo for the first 15 minutes. However by the end of the lagoon there were 10s of flamingos and I spent some time watching them paddle around.
We left Walvis Bay and made the 40 minute drive to Swakapund. En-route we stopped at Bird Island, but again there wasn’t much to see except some birds sitting on a platform in the distance and some big container ships on the horizon.
We decided to do a few touristy things today, firstly we visited the Krystal Galerie. I thought this was excellent as there were some great samples of tourmaline and even the worlds largest quartz crystal cluster on display, which apparently weighs 14 tons.
We then ate some sandwiches on the beach by “The Mole” which was built to be a deep water harbour. However, the designer had not accounted for the shifting sands and the harbour was silted up within a year. We then went to the museum which had an incredibly varied collection, but was very interesting. I did not know how many different languages and ethnicities there were here.
After getting back to the car to drive to tonight’s accommodation we discovered we had a flat battery. It was inevitable this would happen as it seems everyone has headlights on during the day and our car doesn’t tell you if you leave them on with the engine off.
After a few minutes of debating whether or not we should wait until there was less traffic before attempting a bump start, we decided just to go for it. Olly had to do the actual starting as I had no idea what I was doing. This left me in charge of pushing, after pushing the car at a slow speed 100m along the main road to no avail we had caused enough of a scene for someone to come to our aide with a set of jump leads. The friendly guy then showed me which bit of the car to touch with the frayed wire and within 5 minutes we were back on the road!
We settled into our accommodation, attempted to do some planning for the next few days and then headed out for some very tasty wood fired pizza.