Hot stuff
Trip Start
Nov 07, 2005
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Trip End
Nov 04, 2006
Solitaire / Soussouvlei / Luederitz / Fish River Canyon,
Namibia
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
After our 4 luxury nights in a bed, our next stop was another bush camp where there was more sand than a sandpit and far too much wind for my liking. I slept on the truck again, this time because I didn't want to wake up to find I'd been buried alive under half a ton of sand.
The next official camp site was just as bad in the sand department but then we put the sand to good use and visited some monster sand dunes at Soussouvlei. For some reason there was a plague of beeds around and a few people got stung in various uncomfortable places. Our guide on the dunes was a hardcore desert walker who ran over the dunes barefoot in 45 degree heat whilst we panted and dragged ourselves after him.
Coming back after sunset in the dark was bizarre as we never drive the truck in the dark and it felt like we were on a ghost train. It was wrong. Aside from the bees, the only other injury from the desert was a few sunburned noses, but as Brent noted, despite the fact the sun shines out of his arse, that area hadn't been affected.
Our long drive to Shark Island in Lederitz was made even longer by the fact that we suffered 2 blow outs on the tyres in the space of 1 hour. The second one resulted in the entire rim of the tyre flying off down the road behind us.
We passed a desert graveyard on the way which is one of the strangest things I've ever seen and everyone became incresingly bored of being on the truck. You can kind of guess this by the fact that this entry is especially boring, because nothing really happened.
We gave up on trying to cook in a sandy environment and went out for dinner instead, of which I was quite glad because I'm not a huge fan of eating sand.
The next day we went to Kolmasklopp, a former diamond mining town which is now a totally deserted ghost town. After exploring the empty, sand filled buildings which have been looted of almost all their furnishings, I enjoyed some lovely unghostlike scones and then endured another long drive through deserted but beautiful Namibia.
We had a refreshing shower of rain, the first rain in ages, which sadly cast a lot of cloud over our view of Fish River Canyon. We arrived late at our camp in Ai-Ais but no one complained as we all jumped in the hot springs which managed to relieve a bit of tension.
Apologies for the boring entry but...well it was a boring couple of days really.
