Namibia: Swakopmund

Swakopmund is a nice town and we found some interesting shops with local produce – some were just kitschy souvenirs, but some were nice cosmetics or leather products. Recycled Nespresso pods are widely used to make all sorts of figurines of different sizes.

The houses are quite pretty – very colourful and the German influence is quite obvious. And there’s plenty of Guinea fowls too!

South of Swakopmund is Walvis Bay, an interesting, beautiful in its own way and economically very important place. It is a fairly large industrial port, with many cranes loading big transport ships. Apparently its industrial port processes a similar volume of cargo as Hamburg. Unlike its German counterpart, it is not all containers, some of it is minerals or agricultural stuff, as neighboring countries ship from here as well. They also have cruise ships visiting so the necessary souvenir shops, beggars trying to either “protect” your car or sell you things and restaurants are present to serve the tourists.

There is an interesting phenomenon in this part of the world where they get fog sometimes for 300 days a year. The fog is there in the mornings, and is due to a cold current, Benguela current (that comes all the way from Antarctica), that meets hot air from Namib desert. As the temperature gets warmer during the day the blue sky becomes visible. But quite often the fog starts returning late afternoon, as the hot air from the desert causes some water evaporation over the ocean, and with the change in temperature there is a change in air movement as well. This phenomenon happens along most of the Skeleton Coast, the western coast of Namibia.

When we arrived in the morning the ocean was mirror-still and, with the sky being quite cloudy, it was hard to tell what was water and what was sky, the boats and oyster gallons appearing to float in the ether.

We went for a cruise on a catamaran that had some pelicans and sea lions visiting. There were lots of sea lions in the whole harbor as there are quite a few “seal” colonies on the sandbank (or sandspit according to the locals) that borders the lagoon sheltering it from the ocean and which ends with Pelican Point. The sea lions were frolicking everywhere, and we saw a few people in kayaks who went to visit them. Close to Pelican Point there is a very fancy lodge right next to the old light house (apparently bought and refurbished by a Belgian guy). Now why somebody would want to go and stay there AND pay good money for it, I am not sure, considering the smell from the sea lion colony. But maybe the views of the Atlantic Ocean really are extraordinary and the lodge is upwind.

Oysters are grown and harvested in this bay. They do not naturally grow here, but they were brought over from France, are bred on shore as they need warmer water, and then taken out in the bay just to live and grow, which they can do in the colder water.

Once we reached the ocean on the other side of the sandbank we saw dolphins as well which were quite different to the Australian ones – smaller, with some lighter areas on their sides (they are called Heaviside’s dolphins). There were also a couple of seals that we initially thought were dolphins as they were swimming up and down in the water the same way. I am not sure if that’s how they normally move at speed of if they were actually trying to immitate dolphins for some reason (hunting or tourist show).

On the way back the skipper took us past a Russian ship which apparently stays in this area all year round, catching mackerel only, and there are other ships that come to get loaded with the packs of frozen fish.

We got oysters and champagne on the boat, as well as a free show of pelicans and sea lions visiting and begging for fish. There were two German girls on the boat who were a show in themselves as they were afraid of the pelicans so kept going round the boat trying to get away from them.

A short video with some sights from the drive from Swakopmund to Walvis Bay and also the cruise can be seen here.

After lunch our local guide, Benny, from Sand Waves Adventure, took us for a drive along the beach to Sandwich harbor and then across the dunes. Pressures in the tyres down to 1 bar, we drove past the salt factory, around the lagoon dotted with pink flamingoes, across the beach to the sand dunes (where he checked the tyre pressures again and dropped them back to 1 bar). We took advantage of the low tide to be able to drive across the beach, as the ocean gets very close to the dunes at high tide.

The driving across the dunes was extraordinary, especially going down the steep dune faces. We only got bogged once when going up the first dune. After a few dune crossings and slides we stopped for a snack on top of a dune (actually on some sort of plateau in between dunes). It wasn’t only the view that was quite extraordinary, but the cloud / fog that cleared around lunchtime was coming back to shore from the ocean and slowly, slowly engulfed us and the dunes, creating an eerie, story-like fantastic atmosphere. This change in weather was impressive to witness: overcast, still and grey in the morning, cleared up, sunny around lunchtime, then the clouds came back greyer and greyer and the drive back was beautifully eerie in the low cloud, with only some pink flamingoes visible on the lagoon.

A video with some beautiful sights of the drive to and then across the dunes can be seen here.

On the way back we noticed some paragliders taking advantage of the air currents created by the same air movements that brought the cloud / fog on shore.