The start of all the fun

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There are nowhere near enough adjectives to describe the past three weeks...
by now a lot of it has already started to blur together, but when class consists of climbing the 2nd tallest dune in the world, milking cows, going on safari and rafting the zambezi...how can you expect me to keep the adventures apart? It's been incredible...hands down the best 3 weeks of the semester. Most days were spent laughing that we get grades for this and thinking about what we'd be doing if we actually had to go to real classes back home.

so for your attention span and mine as well i'm going to give it a shot to split these up, and read at your leisure.

Swakopmund
Rural Homestay
Etosha
Victoria Falls

So we started our adventure several weeks ago at Swakopmund as part of a class trip. It was a much needed change of sceneary, I think we were all ready to get out of the house and out of the city. Picture your stereotypical African road trip, and I feel like you have the drive there pictured. It was just a straight road through the desert and savanah and mountains...so even though it's cramped and hot in those combis, it was a pretty drive and there was such a pressure change driving from the middle of the desert to the ocean that my ears popped as much as on a plane. Swakop is a tourist beach town right on the coast of the Atlantic that they say is more German than Germany. It is also right outside of Swakopmund where Brad and Angelina had their baby, since I am well aware of the fact that that is the only reason most people know Namibia. I haven't been to Germany...but it was pretty darn German. Apparently businesses still displayed swastikas up until the 1990s. That being said though...I loved it. It was freezing and windy- totally reminded me of North Carolina beaches in early spring.

A definite highlight was climbing dune 7. It's the second tallest sand dune in the world, the tallest is in southern Namibia. Another one of the girls in our group had gone with her host family and described it as an easy 5 minute walk...that 80 year olds and 3 year olds were doing it. After a large piece of chocolate mousse and those expectations, the dune kicked my butt. It puts Jockey's Ridge to shame, and for everyone step you took up you slid down about 2 steps. The view was amazing up there and the most fun was the running all the way down the dune...even though in just seconds you undid all the work you just put into climbing up.

The rest of Swakop was awesome, just not necessarily news worthy. We did some municipality tours- which were generally less than exciting, went to a snake museum and effectively freaked ourselves out about what would attack us during our homestays and ate some delicious dinners and CGEs wallet. We continued our streak of raucous monday nights out and we stayed in a Lutheran guesthouse that was painted bright orange and purple. That in itself was great...it was even greater when Tyler and I got locked out at 3 in the morning after we all had gone for a swim in the FREEZING Atlantic ocean. This wouldn't be anywhere near the problem it sounds like if every building in Namibia wasn't surrounded by tall concrete walls with electric fences on top of them. The night would have be almost boring without that fun addition though, and our throwing rocks at windows did eventually pay off. Unfortunately it was a middle aged Namibian man in his underwear that woke up and let us in, not Seth.

Swakop was an awesome start to an amazing 3 weeks...we loaded up the vans early Thursday morning for a ridiculously long day in the combis dropping everyone off at their rural homestay villages. Which is our next adventure.

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Photos

Swakop sunset
sunsets on the east coast really don't have anything on west coast ones.