Swakopmund

Hello everyone! I hope you’re all doing well in the States. I just had an awesome weekend in Swakopmund.

Let me first say that the desert is beautiful. I’ve never seen anything like it my life nor do I think I ever will again (unless I come back here of course). It was a four-hour drive from Windhoek to Swakopmund, going north towards the coast. The landscape gradually turned from beautiful mountains to arid desert. Mountains are weird here. They just seem to rise up out of nowhere, and then you drive by them and they’re gone. Another interesting note about the drive: along the side of the road I saw a pipeline. Being an American, my first assumption was that it was oil, because oil is an important natural resource in our society. But then I thought more about it, and realized that it wasn’t oil…it was water. Namibia is a desert; therefore water is the most important natural resource. Duh! Also, as another note on the landscape: Namibia has mostly ephemeral rivers, meaning that the river is only there some of the time. The river might not even run for years, but a sign is still there tell you that there’s a river. Instead of a river, you see a bunch of plants growing in a dried-up riverbed. It’s pretty cool actually. Swakopmund also has an interesting feature unique to the area: the fog. Every morning and evening (I think) fog rolls in from the ocean, and that’s the only way anything grows in the area. The plants and insects get a lot of their water from the fog. When we first drove in, we could see the fog rolling in from the ocean. And it wasn’t like normal fog. It was sort of like a low-lying storm cloud that just made everything sticky and humid. Oh, and it was pretty cold. In Namibia, it’s colder on the coast. And I, assuming that we were going to the beach where it would of course be hot and sunny, didn’t bring a jacket. Big mistake. But I never really had the time to buy one because I was so busy. Which I’m about to get to.

Friday night our advisors took us out to dinner. It was at a steakhouse that had a Native American theme. It was weird. Then we all just went out afterwards to a place called “The Lighthouse” – right next to a lighthouse in fact – that had a really good view of the ocean. Of course it was too dark to really see, but I had my first view of the Atlantic Ocean from the other side.

Saturday morning was Sandboarding. There were two options for Sandboarding: lie-down or stand-up. I took the lie-down option because I have no skill in Snowboarding, and just wanted to have fun without having to learn how to do it. Well, they took us out there and I had my first view of the sand dunes. They were huge. Majestic is a good word. Like I said, you’d never see anything like them outside of Africa. Absolutely beautiful. Anyways, out of the large amount of people going Sandboarding, only four of us did the lie-down boarding. It involves sliding down on your stomach face-first on a flexible piece of board down these gigantic dunes. They’re also very steep. First of all, the walk up is brutal. Walking in sand is tough anyway, but when it’s a huge steep dune and you’re carrying a big piece of board, it’s much harder. Also, I’m afraid of heights. So when I got to the top and got ready to go down for the first time, I was terrified. In fact, every time I got ready to go down the dunes, I was terrified. They’re very steep, and you’re falling face-first with you face inches from the sand. It’s really intense. It got better though. It was also better when I screamed. Once we got to the biggest dune of all, I was not going down it. I was getting on the board and I kept telling the guy “No, no, I can’t do this.” Well, eventually he got tired of it and he just pushed me. If he had not pushed me, I would not have gone down it. But I’m glad I did. Also on this last dune, they clocked our speed. The fastest I went was 63 km/h, or around 40 mph. That is the fastest I have ever gone outside of a moving vehicle. Just imagine going face-first with your head inches from the sand down a huge, steep sand dune at 40 mph. It was intense, to say the least. Total, I went down 6 times, each time on a different dune. I’ll probably never do anything like that ever again. It was awesome.

The best part was that after we were all done and I had poured all of the sand out of my shoes, they gave us sandwiches, water, soda, and beer. This was all included in the price of N$250, or around US$25. What a great deal.

Later that afternoon, I went horseback riding through the desert. That was nice. Definitely not the intense experience of earlier. Not much to say about it really, except that the desert is absolutely beautiful, which I’ve already said. By the end of the day I was exhausted.

The next morning, I went on a desert tour. This time I took my film camera to get some artsy pictures. The tour itself was like 5 hours long. Our guide was a really cool person too. We saw lizards, snakes, skinks, and chameleons. The skinks were the interesting ones. They’re basically lizards with no arms, legs, or eyes. They’re not snakes. Strange. We went driving around the desert in these huge vehicles and sometimes went directly over the dunes at crazy angles. That was scary. At one point, we went to see the “roaring dunes.” We stopped at the very top of this large steep dune. Then the driver killed the engine and let the vehicle slide down the dune on its own. Then we could just hear the sand grinding underneath us, roaring if you will. It was really cool. Honestly, one of the coolest things I saw in the desert was the old South African Railway, built in the 50’s, abandoned in the 80’s, due to sand. All that was left of it were old concrete slabs and twisted metal wires strewn over the dunes. It was quite a sight to see. I got some really good pictures of it. Overall, the tour was just really great to see the desert. It’s not something that I’m going to get to do again anytime soon.

So, that was my trip. Now I have to get back to work. Come April 1, I’ll be in Mariental! See ya!