Namibia

I am embarrassed to say that this time two years ago I didn't know Namibia existed! When the rugby World Cup was held in NZ in 2011. We decided to support the Namibian team simply because I had never heard of the country before. Now here we are visiting, seems a little unreal. We only have four days here before heading off to Europe. Namibia is huge and being mostly desert, is very sparsely populated, so in our four days we are going to drive a long way and see few people!

We flew into Windhoek, the only airport I have ever flown into where apart from the airport building there was not another building in sight. We picked up our grunty diesel Hilux four wheel drive and off we went. 240ks of gravel road latter we reached our desert camp. On the drive we passed six cars, about ten houses,  some baboons, a mongoose, a dassie, a warthog some eland a springbok and a herd of goats on the road.

The night sky was fantastic, so dark and just so many stars it made the usual constellations like the Southern Cross and Scorpio difficult to pick out!

Thursday morning we were up at 4.30am to drive another 140 ks into and dune country, the Sossusvlei. The pictures will show how spectacular it was.

Back at our camp by late afternoon we had a quick dip in the swimming pool. Afterwards we sat on huge rocks and drank some very good South African wine and gazed at this enormous, beautiful land. Doesn't get much better! 

Goats and fat tailed black sheep sleeping on the road. 

A Social Weaver nest. Up to 200 birds in here!

The Moon and Venus over the Namib desert.

In the Death Vlei.

We climbed Dune 45. Pam in the red top. 

Sunset over our desert swimming pool at the lodge. The water was cold!  

Crossing the Namib Naukluft desert Friday 12 July, on our way to Swakopmund. 180 km's of this! Glad it wasn't hot but it was bright and my eyes were pretty tired by the end of it. 

 

Hard to tell where road ends and desert begins....   Almost all of the country's main roads are gravel. 

To be fair, it wasn't all dead flat. This is the Kuiseb River gorge. Every few years it must rain reasonably hard and this river fills up.

Above the gorge some very rugged land with big lines of rock strata. 

If you were a lizard, this is what your world would look like 

Found this amazing jewel of a plant. The leaves are covered with tiny translucent spheres that sparkle in the sun. Can't find out what it is. 

You can just see the white speck that is our car in the distance while we were out walking. We didn't want to lose sight of it.