Big Brother’s African Brother #55: Swakopmund, Namibia

Swakopmund, Namibia

Living the high life with adrenalin coursing through our veins, I crash and roll a quadbike, quaff champagne and oysters and hold my breath as Tom whizzes past me at 80kmph.
October 2002

(N$10.1 = US$1)

Namibia hasn’t exactly endeared itself to me. Blisteringly hot, foul tasting drinking water, endless barren scenery, long straight empty roads that deaden the brain, lousy radio that reports that the President of Namibia popped to the toilet in the middle of the night, and a persistent litter problem in the National Parks.

Swakopmund was a chance for Namibia to prove that my scathing assessment was a touch rash. The town is situated on the west coast of Namibia and enjoys blissful 20�C temperatures and constant mist that obscures the coastline. This climate was a welcome relief from the heat. Swakopmund is truly unique in that it holds two meteorological world records: the largest documented rainless period (fifteen years) and the most variable rainfall (1 – 148mm). The encroaching desert is thought to be the oldest in the world where the ecosystem survives on fog generated moisture that can exceed rainfall.

Having a bright and breezy British seaside resort atmosphere without the rundown arcades and cheesy cafes meant that I fell in love with the place. There was even a bracing wind off the sea. I could almost imagine parking the car facing the beach and producing a flask of hot tea while watching the tide come in. For once, the tourist information centre was exceptional, manned by an ultra-efficient German woman. We fell on our feet by camping in the back garden of Desert Sky Backpackers that thankfully closed its doors to overland trucks!

In the kitchen preparing dinner, a pasttime that is guaranteed to bring all the weirdoes out of the woodwork to comment on my gourmet creations, I suspected that a fellow camper was Israeli. This was due to her traits of: rudeness, an unhealthy obsession with money (although I admit that most travellers are obsessed with their budget to some degree) and an uncooperative nature. Scowling, she bombarded me with questions on where I had been and how much it had cost. Memories flooded back of being interrogated in an Israeli airport when we were trying to board our flight home.

I’m beginning to wonder if it has become unfashionable amongst the travelling fraternity to pick up a guide book and read it before visiting a country. It is nice to have a vague idea of a country’s highlights and culture. So I was astonished to find that she had never heard of Etosha, had no idea of the political situation in Zimbabwe and thought it would only take two weeks to drive up to Nairobi. One thing she was sure about – Namibia and South Africa were awfully expensive even though they were camping. She was about to get a shock if she travelled up to Kenya and Tanzania.

Swakopmund has been described as more German than Germany, not that I saw much evidence of this in town. Tom is entranced by property prices, unable to pass an estate agent’s window without peering in. He was particularly interested in a six bedroom house with three bathrooms, a triple garage and three attached holiday flats for the sum of �140,000. Back in London, you would be lucky to buy a broom cupboard for that price.

There are a thousand and one activities on offer at reasonable prices: sandboarding (N$200), quadbiking over sand dunes (N$280), paragliding (N$500), scenic flights along the Skeleton Coast (from N$550), sky diving (N$1500) and dolphin cruises (N$290).

Quadbiking

We plumped for quadbiking, setting off on our sundowner excursion with Dare Devil Adventures. It is a wonderful way to explore and experience the beauty of the ever changing dune landscape. Donned in helmet and goggles, it all seemed so simple. All I had to do was sit on a fully automatic 160cc quadbike and drive it over the sand dunes, using the accelerator and brake. Unfortunately, I have a history of being clumsy, nervous of speed, accident prone and uncoordinated. Hardly the skills required for quadbiking. In retrospect, I should never have been allowed within three metres of a quadbike.

The dunes to the south of Swakopmund are a rippling sea of pale yellow sand forming dynamic contours that extended as far as the eye can see into the distance. I was impressed by the scale of the dunes but knew that this was nothing compared to Sesriem and the Namib-Naukluft Park.

Our guide hummed over the dunes for an uneventful ten minutes while we followed his tyre tracks, admiring the beauty of our sandy surroundings. I occasionally slipped off the tracks, finding the bike difficult to control. We came to a halt at the top of a steep hill so our guide could instruct us on the safest way down. No acceleration, no brake, just roll down the hill in a straight line. Easy as pie. With trepidation, I watched as our guide rolled over the top and then Tom replicated his perfect descent. They waited patiently at the bottom of the slope, while I gazed down over the edge, the butterflies in my stomach getting the better of me. You only live once they say and my life flashed before me as I accelerated over the edge, lost my nerve, screamed like a banshee and heard Tom yelling, “Brake, brake, brake, brake.” Of course, I hit the accelerator instead.

Losing control of the bike completely, I crashed into Tom’s right rear tyre, flipping the bike and landing heavily with a sickening thud onto the right side of my head. My quadbike was on its side pinning me down. Luckily I was wearing a crash helmet, so even though it hurt like hell, I didn’t think I’d wind up in casualty with a subdural hematoma.

Feeling groggy and eating sand, Tom came rushing over to rescue me from the wreckage. Our guide, poor soul, was busy surveying the damaged quadbikes. Mine was leaking oil and took an eternity to start up. Tom’s quadbike now had a wobbly rear wheel. Just to prove I was probably concussed, I gingerly completed the rest of our session, attempting no more steep hill descents. Tom attacked two huge dunes, receiving an awesome adrenalin rush from the free fall sensation. I merely watched him drop over the edge, heart in my mouth. As we neared the Dare Devil headquarters, our guide understandably panicked, fearing he would lose his job if we divulged the details of our little accident. He implored us not to mention the damage to the bikes and we agreed.

The other casualty of our ill fated excursion was Tom’s trousers. Already his convertible trousers had been ruined when the gas fired camping light melted a hole in the knee. Now his last pair of decent trousers had a hole in them where the material had touched against the hot quadbike exhaust.

I awoke the next morning with a terrible headache and a fuzzy feeling that Tom was quick to point out was not unusual. Most mornings I talk gibberish and that morning was no exception. I was convinced that a few glasses of champagne and a boat trip on choppy seas would blow the cobwebs away. We made a beeline for Walvis Bay about 20km south of Swakopmund.

Cape Seal

Here we boarded a boat for our dolphin and seal tour. We coasted into the lagoon populated by a menagerie of seabirds: greater and lesser flamingo, cormorants and common terns. Within minutes of departing, our first Cape seal leapt onboard, liberally spraying us with water. He was overshadowed by gigantic bull seal Tussels, who muscled his way on board in search of a fish reward, bringing most of the ocean with him. Over a metre long, his bulk filled the centre of the boat. He coughed violently, causing me to jump back after I caught a glimpse of his yellow, ragged teeth. Competing for attention, a female Cape seal entertained us by covering her face and whiskers with her flippers. As the boat sped away, she swam alongside the outboard motors. The time flew by as we stroked and fed Cape seals and spotted bottle-nosed dolphins and delicately pastel coloured pelicans.

After four hours at sea, we were treated to a seafood platter lunch of giant prawns, calamari, crab and oysters. I downed three glasses of champagne and it wasn’t long before I was smiling inanely at fellow passengers and on the verge of slurring my words. Unsteady on my feet, I decided to remain seated, wanting to avoid any man overboard situations.

Gleefully I listened to a hooray Henry British couple from Cirencester, commending us on our excellent job of single handedly negotiating our way through Africa (we didn’t like to mention that we had spent five weeks on an overland truck and shatter their perception of us). “We think you chaps are so terribly enterprising to be backpacking through Africa on your own, it must be so dangerous.” They had just finished a luxury horseback safari in Botswana, saturating themselves in gin and tonic every night.

Not wanting to disappoint them, my face took on a serious expression as I leant forward and in a confidential tone said “It was just hell getting through the border checkpoints. The officials were armed with AK47s and stuck the gun muzzles in our backs.” They gasped in shock as I added, “It was touch and go whether we would make it through.” That shut them up.

After the nasty knock on the head that I’m sure contributed to me winding up the posh British couple, I wasn’t keen on our next activity – sandboarding down the dunes at speeds of 80kmph. Neither was Tom as he was sick of worrying about what disaster would befall me next. Sandboarding has the option of standing up, rather like snowboarding, or lying down, which was the style Tom chose.

Sandboarding

I gracefully bowed out of this adrenalin activity but Tom had great fun. Sandboarding involved trudging to the top of an enormous dune before lying chest down on a slither of plywood and hurtling down a dune at frightening speed. There was a certain technique to sandboarding if you didn’t want to eat copious amounts of sand on the way down; lift the board at the front, keep elbows up and out to the side and feet hovering above the sand. The only downside to boarding is sand invades every orifice imaginable.

During the excursion, all our exploits were filmed and for a reasonable N$100, we could purchase a video that would make an excellent souvenir. We were invited to a viewing in a local bar that evening.

The rest of the sandboarders were all from overland trucks, namely Acacia and Dragoman. The overlanders complained of being railroaded into activities, often pressurised to cram as many as possible into a short time frame. A few were sandboarding, quadbiking and skydiving all in one day. I think that half the fun of doing activities is the anticipation beforehand so I was glad that we had been able to pause for breath by choosing to do a different activity every day rather than every day becoming a blur.

That evening, the bar was heaving with trendy, chain smoking, inebriated twenty-somethings impressing each other with downing their drinks in one gulp and propping themselves seductively against the bar. They were watching a boring quadbike video that featured a large group negotiating the dunes like old fogies. Not once did they attempt a steep drop. Unimpressed by this, we weren’t too optimistic about the sandboarding video. The overland truckers had raved about how professional the camera girl was. Quite frankly the footage was amateurish with wobbly sweeps of the dunes reminiscent of my own appalling camera technique. We saved our money and left the truckers to prove how cool they were by collapsing in a drunken heap on the floor and draping themselves over the pool table.