In terms of culture and exoticism Namibia does not really pack a massive punch, but it does have some great sights, it is incredibly easy going and it is a fantastic self-drive destination – so it has made for a pretty good time overall. The first place we hit up was fish river canyon and while everyone says that one “must” go and see this, it is really just a big canyon. In season you can do a five day hike through it, which I imagine would be pretty cool – but when we were there you could only look at it from the top. Admittedly it was impressive, but we weren’t really able to do anything, which makes it a bit less interesting for us.
Next, we went to Luderitz, which is a windy (understatement) old German harbor town with some nice architecture, a miner ghost town in the desert, oysters (yes, I actually ate some of these) and not much to do. Lucky for us, we met some friends there and spent a fantastic week catching up on our respective travels since we had last seen each other in Tanzania. We did spend a morning wandering the townships though and took pictures for the local kindergarten.
From Luderitz we moved upcountry and hit up a strange German Lego style castle in the desert before heading to one of Namibia’s biggest tourist attractions – Sossusvlei. While this is definitely directly smack in the middle of the tourist trail, we really loved this place. The dunes and dead marshes were just too surreal and we spent about 12 hours from sunrise to sunset exploring the area (an activity which it normally takes people about four hours to complete). Needless to say, we were exhausted at the end of the day, but it was exceptional and absolutely worth it.
We also headed to another section of the Namib-Naukluft National Park for some free camping and hiking. The area was lovely, but we managed to see two Cape Cobras (not happy about this) and get caught on the highest exposed point in the hike in the middle of a fantastic thunder storm.
On a side note, Blue Lightning is doing pretty okay. That said, due mostly to our own stupidity, we managed to puncture and shred two tires on entry into Namibia (not cool). Happily, we have not had any further problems with our fancy new tires (woohoo!). Another note must be given to mechanics in these countries – they are awful. I will expand with a few examples below:
- They seem completely incapable of understanding how a lock nut works. Whenever we take Blue anywhere, we duly hand over the lock nut and they have difficulty fitting it right (square peg, square hole, round peg, round hole – does not appear to be something they got to play growing up (while this is funny in some ways, it is actually pretty sad and true given what we have seen of the upbringing of the far majority of children in Africa)), then, next thing you know, they have a hammer out and are smashing it into place.
- We took the car to Toyota (which is normally pretty okay) in Windhoek and they tried to lift it on one of those full car jacks – next thing you know the back pad falls out because they did not bother to place it properly and the whole car almost falls off the lift. Needless to say – I do not handle these situations calmly and Thomas generally makes me leave the garage.
- Finally, we took Blue to get a wheel balance in Windhoek and they did such a bad job that they did it twice and we were still there five hours later. Seriously. For a wheel balance.
Thus is the fun of having a car in Africa. We now watch anything anyone does like hawks and have lost all trust.
Windhoek was not really much to write home about, but the somewhat legendary Joe’s Beer house was excellent. They had German beer (delicious) and zebra steak (double delicious). Although, I have to admit, 300g of zebra steak completely defeated me. Swakopmund was touristy and not super interesting, but it did have good cake. Those were pretty much the food highlights of Namibia and largely we are very grateful to be able to cook for ourselves!
February 2014