Adler Garni Hotel Swakopmund

Swakopmund is full of tourists, mostly German, and since it's the only place to go for hundreds of miles, the prices in the tourist shops are very high. Oh well, I don't really want to carry anything with me anyway!

Going back to where I left off yesterday:
After crossing the border on Thursday, we watched the sunset over Fish River Canyon, which is apparently the second biggest canyon in the world after the Grand Canyon, For dinner ...

... was feeling confident enough to lift her eyes from the tracks and look around. To her delight, Wayne had been moved out of the fast group by the leader and put into remedial. Perhaps another german phrase for the day would have been schadenfreude.

That evening we went out to the skydive club to watch Jackie, Wayne, Kaito and Elena skydive. We sat at the bar drinking Jagermeister and shouting encouraging things at them as they suited up for their jump ...

... even came with your own bear costume, goldylock dress and blond wig....yup my kinda place lol. We then headed to the hostel Dan was staying as they had an all you could eat "brine" which is what they call BBQ. I was really happy with the all you can eat portion of the deal but the food turned out to be awesome and in fact the hostel was really cool and even better was half the price of the hostel I was at. So even though I felt like a prick after the nice treatment I got ...

... a tandem. Gabe and I somehow fit one board and went down together. But, it was the fifth run that we were all waiting for. It was the fastest run and for it they took out the speed gun. I went first and got 75 km/hr. They said the fastest they had ever recovered was 82 but recently had only gotten to 77. For this run even the snowboarders got off and gave it a try.

For a long time my time held and being moderately (haha) competitive I was excited. We ...

... continued to be pushed into smaller and smaller pieces of undesirable land they began to fight back. Using the same hunting skills they had honed to kill Hamsbach they approached people stealthily using as much cover as possible; when there were no bushes around they would sometimes bring their own, inching closer and closer until they were within 6 feet and could launch a poisonous arrow. Thus the name bushmen, for ...

So we've crossed the border into Namibia now and have been travelling through the desert for a few days. The group is a mixed bunch from many countries including Australia, New Zealand, England, Ireland, Netherlands, Germany, USA and Canada. We got to know each other when we all went out for dinner after our meeting and it seemed like a good bunch from the start - with many different personalities and many different backgrounds too.
We started the ...

... a city. For Ben's birthday we drove down to cape point, had an English picnic, we saw whales on the way down and then for dinner we went out and drank too much red and had a smashing night.

We are looking forward to the next section of our trip (which is the same rout but ends a few weeks quicker). We are not sure what we ll get up to after that, hopefully en up in Egypt for a couple of weeks and then we ll see.

Whew ... thats us up to date and now I ll try and up load some photos.

... spider and it's lair hidden beneath the sand and fed us dried nuts from a jackal poo. A wild day by all standards, but the highlight for me was walking barefoot through the desert to the Dead Vlei. The area formed due to certain geographical circumstances and has resulted in 1000 year old preserved trees trapped in an off-white grave.

We learned many bits of information from our bushman guide ...

... had a guided walk with a very interesting and hilarious bushman guide, and saw the famous petrified forest, which is between two large dunes. They are acacia trees that died 600-900 years ago, but they don't rot because there is no water in the area at all. It only rains about every decade in that area, so as the dunes grow together, little valleys form between the rows of dunes, creating little areas of petrified forest. Pretty cool place to take some pictures ...

March 9th - Swakopmund The sand boarding people picked us up at 9.30am and took us to dune no7 just outside town. After getting our equipment on and choosing a board it was time for the part Cesca had not been looking forward to, the trek up the dune. Unfortunately, due to it being a national park there was no ski-lift even if they could attach it to a constantly drifting lump of sand! It was a very hot day and we were dripping with sweat by the time we reached the top ...