Day 194 - More German than Germany

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An astonishingly early start today with breakfast at 5:30am. We're camping and it doesn't get light until 5:45am so it's a pretty stupid time to have breakfast but there you go, we're not in charge. We drove firstly to an amazing little town, well collection of buildings, called Solitaire. Despite only having one shop, the place is famous for its apple crumble. And quite right too - it was the most delicious apple crumble ever tasted. On a chalkboard they display the world news because people around here don't have much contact with the outside world. We're clearly not missing much whilst we're in the Namibian desert because the current summary of world events is 'D Beckham to play in the US. Temperature 42C'.

At lunchtime we arrived in Swakopmund, Namibia's holiday destination. It's a small town but enormous by the standards of the last week, and we're here for 3 nights and remarkably we're sleeping in proper beds. They feel like the greatest of luxuries. The German influence is very strong and the Germans say it's more German than Germany. So we stroll past the shellsuit stores, the mullet barbers and the jokebook shops and chill out for the afternoon before heading out with the rest of our gang of 30 for dinner in Neapolitana. This is a great place with gigantic portions so we shared a steak. But not just any old steak - after our desert walk guide told us that Oryx is the best tasting meat in Africa we thought we'd give it a go. And very nice it was too (if not up to Argentinian beef standards). The evening turned out to be quite boozy, with shooters called Springboks going down again and again and loads of pool. Gemma even ended up dancing on a table. And when that place closed we went on a classic drunken wander looking for more booze, just like university days. But on this occasion we were out of luck.

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