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Namibian vacationland…

Saturday, May 26th, 2007

So we’re in Swakopmund.  It’s on the coast.  It’s apparently where Namibians vacation.  And I’m feeling icky.  Head cold.  It probably doesn’t help that I was wearing my heavy winter coat in Windhoek and now it’s totally sunny – John’s been having fun with his allergies – as soon as he hit the desert it was like, poof, time for the nose to run – the weather has literally been all over the friggin’ planet.

Anyway, we’re just chillin’ in this cool coastal town.  The internet cafes are actually open until 9 or 10 instead of closing like at 5.  Which seems kind of strange – smaller town, longer hours.  No clue. 

We went to see this shipwreck off the coast – some kind of commercial boat that wrecked there last April.  And John went to the Aquarium yesterday to see the shark feeding (I was sleeping).   And the sand here is pretty cool – in places it’s purple from the shells mixing in with the sand.  They also had this really cool lighthouse here. 

Anyway, not a ton to do here – it’s the adventure place but we’re saving ourselves for Vic Falls – very popular to skydive here but I’ve lost my taste for actually wanting to do that.  Maybe it’s the age thing.  Maybe it’s because I’m almost 35! 

We head back to Windhoek tomorrow the 26th and then the next day we head to Zambia to see Victoria Falls!

 

Posted in Nambia, RTW Trip | No Comments »

Namibia – sand and car adventures…oh, and zebra racing!

Thursday, May 24th, 2007

Hello again!  So our 2 heros (yeah, I know, very debatable) took the “luxurious” bus from Cape Town to Namibia.  We left at 10 am from Cape Town and got to Windhoek, Namibia at 6 am the following day (although we lost an hour – Namibia is the only S African country that does any of the bothersome time change thing or daylight savings time).  It’s kind of cool, instead of just a normal bus seat it has this deal that pops up under your knees so you’re kind of on a dentist chair type configuration.  Pretty comfy and didn’t stop anywhere near as many times as the Greyhound did. 

So they drop us at 6 am in the middle of this parking lot behind the visitor’s center and of course there are all these taxi drivers trying to get us to come with them and so forth.  We decide to just walk.  It’s not supposed to be that far to our guest, the Rivendell.  Of course we don’t know where the heck we’re going and we’ve picked up another traveller from Bangladesh that lives in Uruguay that decided to follow us to our guest house.  So after going the wrong direction a bunch of times we finally made it there and then sat in front of their gate for like a half hour until someone showed up to let us in. 

We really liked the Rivendell.  Which was a good thing because we were to return there 2 more times.  The people there were super nice, John was able to rap with the dude from Bangladesh about everything from religion to homeless problems in Bangladesh to being American.  The guests there were pretty much just hanging out because, there is really not a whole lot to do in Windhoek (pronounced Vindhook – we were corrected SOOO many times – we just felt like we should pronounce the o!!) .  And let me tell you, we suck at German pronunciation – this would happen so many times in Namibia – especially to our next destination – Soussuvlei.  Go ahead, try it out.

We rented a car for 5 days.  To see Soussuvlei and the Namib-Naukluft Mountains.  It was both a nightmare and turning point.  First off, we had to go to the rental place a day early.  Because the day we wanted it was a holiday.  Ascension Day.  The day Christ ascended to the heavens?  John was confused too.  The driver then dropped it off the next afternoon and we headed out the next morning.  John (who took on the task of both driving manual and on the left side of the road) took a couple of times to turn the car over but it started.  We figured it was just old and a bit cold. 

We get onto the highway.  As soon as you get out of Windhoek it’s gravel roads.  Okay.  But it ended up being the most beautiful drive.  We saw a gazillion kinds of “deer” (okay, they weren’t deer, but they were deer-like – different horns, different tails, different body shapes), baboons, birds that were amazing – I mean we’re talking national geographic.  Namibia is a very sparsely populated country.  We come upon these “towns” on the map – and they’re like 1 house.  Maybe 2. 

Anyway, we go like 4 1/2 hours to Solitaire and had cake.  It is so funny because first of all it was supposed to take 5 hours to get to our campsite, Sesrium, but just like the rest of Africa so far the people who live there seem to under-exaggerate.  Oh, the Pick-n-Pay (grocery store) is 5 minutes walk away.  Yeah, if you’re superman.  More like 20 minutes.  And if someone says it’s like 5 K away it’s more like 20 K.  Pretty funny.  We have just learned to double everything to be on the safe side.  Solitaire was like another 1 1/2 hours away from Sesrium.  But they had gas there and gas stations are also kind of a rarity so we filled up.  And every time we mentioned Solitaire everyone we met was like, you have to eat their cake (strudel).  It was quite good but maybe I’m just not a strudel-fan because it was just okay to me.  It tasted like dutch apple pie. 

Sesrium.  A very expensive campsite – for both of us it was about the same to camp as it was to stay in a nice double room in Windhoek.  Plus, since you were technically in the national park you had to pay the national park fee.  Which was about the same as the camp fee.  Plus we had to pay for firewood since the cooking facilities we were told would be there didn’t exist.  Nice travel agent guy that we booked the campsite through.  Oh, and the “free” tent we got from the rental company was missing parts.  So John had to jerry-rig it.  But the advantage is you get in early enough to see the sunrise.  Yeah, that would be if you weren’t John and Cindy. 

Because our car wouldn’t start.  We had to watch as all these cars drove by our campsite (until one did stop and help us for a few minutes but even a jump didn’t help).  Oh and did I mention the phones were all broken? This dude from the gas station helped us out for like 2 hours and ended up putting our battery in a battery charger for the night.  And lent us his cell phone to call the car-hire place.  But we missed the sunrise.  We went in finally around 9:30 am after being up since 4 am ish.  The dunes were SPECTACULAR!  Red dunes!  Amazing!  We ran into this guy John had run into in Cape Town and we climbed the highest dune – it was AMAZING!  (Oh, and John pissed off the top of it – bladder issues) and then we ran down the side.  It took like 5 minutes to run down the 3-3 1/2 hours to get up.  

So we get back to our car and it still is having problems starting.  Super.  When we get back to camp the dude from the gas station takes the battery and puts it into the charger.  He also said he’d get us into the park for free the next day since we missed the sunrise.  But of course, it was cloudy the next day so it was not to be.  So we just went onto our next destination, the Nukluft mountains.  

We stayed at the Ababis guest farm.  This would have been amazing place to stay (not camp) if you had a load of cash.  But, well, we don’t have a load of cash so camping it is!  After we made camp we decided to go for this hike around the farm (1 hour or so).  We were like, okay, let’s just start up the car to make sure it will, you know, start.  It barely starts and it’s been like an hour and a half.  Terrific.  Luckily the guest farm also has a battery charger so we were able put it in that.  And of course the phone was out here too.  So we had to use their satellite phone.  Which kept cutting out.  We just decided to cut our losses and head back to Windhoek a day early.  

There was one really cool moment!  We raced a zebra!  We were going along this gravel road heading back to Windhoek and all of a sudden this zebra comes alongside and was racing our little Toyota Tazz!  I mean we’re talking about 65 km/hr!  Finally it went back into the bush but it was like the coolest thing ever! 

Our car-hire place reimbursed us for 4 of the 5 days so it ended up being financially okay – but still we wouldn’t have traded the experience for the world.  We were kind of ho-hum about the whole Africa thing because we’d been on the tourist track the whole time but now we’re raring to go to at least continue on with the African story!     

   

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