Swakopmund

So Swakopmund is a nice wee town - on our way there we cruised around the coast a bit (it's romantically called the 'Skeleton Coast' of course, but most of the coast is under restricted access due to large-scale diamond mining and we only ever saw one shipwreck). We drove through Walvis Bay seeing loads of flamingos and pelicans, and a salt mine with impressive mountains of salt, they use natural evaporation of the sea water I think.

Like most of Namibia that we visited it was almost totally dominated by German tourists (Namibia was a German colony years ago, and it still receives major development aid from there). It bills itself as an adventure capital, with all the usual stuff, but the only really new thing that appealed to me was the sandboarding, so we had to try that. It really is very similar to snowboarding, although they can't construct drag lifts, so you have to hike back up the dune after each run - it was good though. We also got to have a go at riding down the dunes on large sheets of cardboard, which is pretty basic obviously - you just lie down on the sheet, point down the dune and off you go - a good laugh really.

After the boarding we drove around the desert along a specific tourist route to find the oldest plants in the world, the freakish looking welwitschia. You get to see loads of them strewn around, but the one at the end of the drive is by far the most impressive - an absolute monster surrounded by fencing and having a viewing platform.

Other than that we visited a small and a bit dilapidated aquarium (and saw the turtles being feed), ate at a cool restaurant built from an old ship and located on the impressive pier, and watched the flamingos and pelicans.

It was here that we met a guy Frank who is driving a motorcycle around the world - he's been going for 5 years now I think, and reckons he has a couple more to go (http://www.mrbeem.net/). He hopes to make a movie or documentary from all the video footage he's collected. We met him in a cool local bar in Swakopmund (Fagins), where again we were the only white people - it had a great atmosphere with everyone being so friendly and relaxed, and again it made me feel I was back in Africa proper, hanging out with the locals. We actually bumped into Frank again later in Cape Town, and spent a few days hanging around, he was a cool guy.

On the recommendation of a Kiwi girl we decided to take a wee detour to visit Spitzkoppe, another one of Namibia's famous desert attractions. It really is very 'deserty' with lots of mad rock formations and mountains, and a few hard-to-make-out rock paintings. Lots of people camp rough out here, but we just weren't properly prepared that kind of thing unfortunately.

So after our few days chilling out in and around Swakopmund we moved on up to the Etosha National Park, another one of the famous African safari destinations.