Seafood and Shopping Swakopmund Style

Perfect seafood and lots of it! That is the most endearing memory of Swakopmund. We usually eat fish and seafood quite often, but in Africa it is not that easy to find, however  in Swakopmund we were spoilt for choice.

01 Drive Into Walvis from Sesriem

We arrived quite late in town and checked into the Dunes Backpacker Lodge that we had found on the Internet. It turns out they mostly cater for the big truck tour groups, but allowed us a 4 bed dorm room with bathroom on our own. We set off for a walk to the beach, as the sun was setting and spotted a gorgeous looking restaurant in an old tug boat, advertising seafood. They were fully booked but saw our disappointment and said we could eat at the bar with the same menu. It was a very upmarket restaurant, so in our scruffy clothes, we were better suited for the bar anyway. The seafood meal was superb and only $30A including drinks. We decided we liked Swakopmund already!

02 Tug Restaurant - Swakopmund

Our clothes (or lack of them) was now really starting to get us down. One more check at the Air Namibia airline office who phoned the Windhoek airport for us, and advised no, they did NOT have our luggage, so then we took the plunge and went shopping. Swakopmund had lovely shops and we quickly bought some clothes (extremely cheap too) then raced back to the backpackers, so we could put them on then get our other clothes into reception in time to get them washed. Bliss - clean clothes! Never take them for granted!

We then went for a very pleasant walk around town in our clean clothes and discovered that there were lots of outdoor beach side restaurants, all offering astounding seafood deals, trying to outdo each other. The day was warm and our mood high, so we lashed out and had a massive platter for 2, with an included bottle of wine, for a lunch that lasted several hours. For what in Australia you would probably pay well over $150 for, we paid only $30. It was a very laid back and relaxing day, of which we really didn't have too many of this trip.

03 Another Victim?

Getting back to our backpackers we found the overland truck driver in an absolute panic. She couldn't get the truck out, because of our car parked in her way, and she had to get it to the tyre shop. With no way of contacting us, she had started to remove the wheels to be able to have the tyres changed.

The reverse of this happened the next morning when we went to leave in our hire car at 5.30am to drive back to Windhoek. We found ourselves trapped in the driveway by several cars. Heather went and banged on all the doors until she could get the car owners to wake up and move their cars.

There are lots of adventure sports to be tackled in Swakopmund like skydiving, bungee jumping and dune buggies, but tackling our seafood platter and buying some clothes was enough  adventure sport for us!

04 Swakopmund Jetty

05 Swakopmund From Jetty

06 The Boulavard

07 Town Beach