Swakop Lodge Swakopmund

A bed at last, and a bit of adventure sports, skydiving and Quad biking with Wesley Snipes! we stayed at the Swakup Lodge (renamed cause all the tourist kept going into town and getting plastered and forgetting the old african name and getting lost) we planned a few sports here and signed up for a quadbike tour and heard that the movie star Wesley Snipes was in town and just hired out a quad bike and headed out to the dunes like us!....."Oi wesley wait up!!" before that Gareth and I jumped fr...

Friday 11th September . Awake early we hung around in our tent till after sun up and wandered out to enjoy the campfire and coffee while watching the cliffs colours change with the rising sun. Brekky was a cooked one , a bonus as usually it is weetbix /toast. I did tomato and onion gravy which we had with scambled eggs, bacon, mushrooms and toast. We packed up and headed out of the park and drove towards the coast where the landscape became the Namib desert and the vegetation thinned...

Swakopmund is one of Namibia's largest cities with a population of 28,000. It is perhaps the strangest place we have been on this trip, because it is a small German city plopped down in the middle of a desert. The architecture is German, the signs are German, and the names are German. The only clue that you are not in a German town is the desert dunes creeping in at the edges and the palm trees lining the streets. Swakopmund is the perfect location for adreneline activities and offers skydivi...

Another long trip to Swakopmund but again the scenery was spectacular. I don't mind these long trips as the view is so great. Had Oryx and Springbok steaks for dinner at a nearby Italian restarant which was great.

Had a late one last night but we decided at some stage that we should give quad biking a go today. We only went for one hour but wished we'd gone for the longer option as it was great. Went for the semi automatic option - no clutch - and basically you had to go as fast as you could to keep up with the guy in front. It was brilliant shooting up the dunes then coming back down in big archs, so much fun.

There's only six of us on the trip at the moment but five of us went sky diving along with Claire the tour leader who is apparently addicted to it.

It was a lot less nerve racking than I expected. The only point where I thought "oh ****, what am I doing" was when we actually fell out of the plain and there was a tumbling sensation where I wondered where the ground was and where the sky was. But it levelled out pretty soon and the guy soon had me spinning in a circle before the 30 secon...

Another activity we did in the dunes was sandboarding which went from 9:30 - 2 and cost about N$250 (US$25). You had a choice of lay down or sand up which is pretty much like snowboarding. We had heard from others that standup was exhausting as you were constantly hiking up, sliding down the one massive dune whereas laydown was done on a loop made up of 6 different runs and was meant to be a lot more fun so we chose that.

Suze, Linds, Sarah, Martin and I did it along with a bunch of o...

Due to fear of being spotted camped illegally at most probably a sacred sight we had to be up at 5:30 and on the road by 6:30. The stunning sunrise made it slightly easier to get up but still... 5:30. Damn.

The drive to Swakopmund was FREEZING made all the worst by seafog which engulfed us. Within seconds everyone was wrapped up in blankets, hoodies, sleeping bags. Even in sleeping bags it was cold!! Tarps had to be up as we were driving on dirt. The moment we hit sealed road Jay pull...

One morning Oliver and I got up and went on a seal/dolphin cruise. Seen plenty of dolphins before but not seals which is why I wanted to go - plus you got free champange and oysters! Hell yes!!. Oliver got dragged along for the ride.

We boarded the 25 footer boat with about 15 other people and not 30 seconds from the jetty a seal named Google jumped onboard and slithered around. It was hilarious. The skipper would hold out fish and he'd waddle across the seats before jumping up to tak...