Namibia was awesome!

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Hello all! Namibia was awesome! It was quite a bit different from what I expected, and the desert was like nothing I have ever seen before. The trip across the Atlantic was kind of tedious, and I was very anxious to get off the ship by the time we pulled into Africa. The first day there I went on a 4 x 4 tour of the Namib Desert, which was very cool. We got to see all of the different terrain that is in the desert, and this really surprised me because there were tons of really cool rock formations and cliffs that seemed to be totally out of place because there was just sand all around them. The next day I got up at 6 a.m. and went kayaking in the ocean. It was actually really cold and windy at first because it is the end of winter here right now, but once the clouds cleared out it was like 75 degrees and not bad at all. There were tons of seals (like 5000...it was crazy) and they were jumping around in the water all around us, and would come right up to our kayaks and play with our paddles. Then we paddled out a little further into the ocean and got to see some dolphins playing around in the water. They were swimming right under our kayaks, and would follow us when we paddled fast. After that I went back to the ship and got lunch, and then I went to the town that is right down the road from Walvis Bay, called Swakopmund. After exploring the town and markets for the afternoon we all went out to dinner at a place called The Lighthouse that was right on the water. For dinner we started off with some oysters as appetizers, and then I got a dish called the “Carpetbagger”. Although it sounds really weird, this was actually one of the best things I’ve ever had. It was two pieces of tenderloin stuffed with mushrooms and grilled oysters, and had prawns on top along with a real good mushroom-type sauce. It was delicious! Also it was only like a $10 dinner because the exchange rate here is like 8 to 1. Anyway after dinner I went back to the ship because I had another SAS trip at 9 the next morning. That trip was to a place just south of Walvis Bay called Sandwich Harbor. It’s where the massive sand dunes basically run straight into the ocean. To get there we had to drive land rovers through the middle of all of these dunes in Naukluft Park, and we were rallying up and down them the whole way there. Once we got there we got to climb up and down some of the dunes, and we were surrounded by sand on one side, and the ocean on the other. We passed over a red sand beach, and finally reached the actual Sandwich Harbor. There was a massive sand dune there, and at the base of it there was a lagoon that was separated from the ocean by a thin sand bar. I’ll have to put up a picture of it, because it was really beautiful. On the way home we stopped in the middle of the desert and had a really good lunch. That night I went out to dinner at a pizza place, and then went out to some bar for a while. On our last day in Namibia we went 4 wheeling in the sand dunes near Swakopmund. It was really fun, but I had a funny story because I kept on making my 4 wheeler do fish tales, but one time that I did it I was going too fast, and my 4 wheeler was about to flip, so I had to bail off of it, and I ended up having to chase my 4 wheeler down a hill and jump back on while it was still going...it was funny at the time, and don’t worry it wasn’t as bad as it sounds because the sand was really soft and it would be really hard to hurt yourself. Anyway that was basically all of the highlights of my time in Namibia, and right now I’m on my way to Cape Town! After that we have 12 days on the ship until we get to India, but I’ll put up another blog after Capetown and let everybody know how that was.

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