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Published: October 16th 2012
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As I had my trip to the Sossuvlei arranged, I had enough time to take a bus out to Swakopmund for a few days. This was pretty straightforward and the journey took about 4 hours, although the Atlantic Ocean was visible from about 40km away as we approached the end of the Namib deseret. There I found my hostel Desert Sky, easily enough. It had been freezing cold at night time in Windhoek, so I had elected to stay in a dorm once again, even though the temperatures were a lot higher in Swakopmund, in the end.
Swakopmund is a small town right on the Atlantic Coast. Like Windhoek, there is a very German feel to the town. It is almost like how the Bavarians would do coastal town if they had a coast. This surreal feeling of being in 'Little Germany' did not subside in the hostel kitchen, where I prepared my dinner. Everyone was German and speaking
auf Deutsch. With my limited German from school, I gave it a go speaking to them in German and surprised myself, and them I think, with how far the conversation progressed before we reverted to English.
The main draw to
Swakopmund is the adventure sports that can be done nearby. My first morning there, I was up early to go sandboarding. As I got on the bus, there were two lads from Cork, Gary and James, who I had met in Livingstone. There was a group of 15 of us doing the sandboarding. I have never even snowboarded, so I was pretty surprised how I managed to stay up pretty well on my first go down. The only problem with this was that I didn't know how to stop, turn or slow down resulting in me hitting the sand with a bang.
I was fairly sore after this and therefore, tentative when going down the rest of the time. By far the worst part about it is walking up the sand dunes after you have come down, with your board in your hand and, more than likely, sand in your mouth. We also had the option of going down another slope lying down on a mat. You build up some serious speed doing this and they had a guy at the bottom with a speed gun - I clocked in at 71 kmph.
That afternoon, myself, James and
Gary had signed up to do quadbiking in the dunes of the Namib desert. We were joined by 3 Korean girls in some weird, interracial triple date. The dunes were so perfect they looked fake and it soon felt like we had strayed on to another planet. We were supposed to stay in a line and not overtake, but the need for speed got the better of me and I was riding my bike around like a boy racer.
We had a few very steep dunes to negotiate, which were incredible, even if my heart was in my mouth momentarily. We stopped at the top of one of the dunes to watch the sunset, which turned the sand an incredible colour. We were given a beer to have while watching it, then went back to the start.
That evening, we went to watch a video of our sandboarding, which had us all looking pretty stupid. Later that night, we had a barbeque at our hostel. We were joined by one of the Korean girls, Suzi and an English couple, Sally and Gaz. We all went out afterwards and even though Swakopmund's nightlife isn't too hectic, it was a
late enough one and the day after was fairly uneventful, except for me deciding to wash some clothes, which didn't dry by the time I left and had me bringing a bag of wet clothes with me back to Windhoek.
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