Water and sand; life and death.
This morning we do a half day 4×4 tour to Sandwich Harbour, and in the afternoon we take a 90 minute flightseeing tour over the Skeleton Coast.
At 8 am our guide Bart from Desert Tracks picks us up in his 80’s-era Toyota Land Cruiser. We’ve left Swakopmund and are in Walvis Bay before 9 am. Wall-Fish as the locals say.
First, it’s the flamingos. Two kinds, the Greater Flamingo, and the Lesser Flamingo. Or rather, the pink flamingo, and the pinker flamingo. Thousands of them.
We leave Walvis Bay after collecting our permits and drive onto the beach. The destination is Sandwich Harbour, but the journey there along the barren beaches and over endless dunes is the real adventure.
No camping, no fishing. But there are no rules here. My mind doesn’t know what to expect; everything is either sand or sea, yet I’m constantly surprised.
Just as I relax into the ride we pull up beside a human skeleton. An old cemetery, Bart explains. What was buried long ago is now reemerging as the sand shifts.
The landscape seems totally inhospitable, but jackals seem to be hiding around every dune, waiting for something to happen.
We alternate driving through the dunes and on the beach.
In one spot the beach is smeared magenta with pulverized garnet.
Here and there we get out to search the dunes for geckos but find nothing.
Another jackal watches us go by.
And the desert-adapted springbok observe us carefully.
Eventually we get close to Sandwich Harbour, just around the next set of dunes.
There it is, a spit of land hugging a lagoon where an oasis of vegetation thrives.
This is where I decide to climb a dune. What looks an easy jaunt is a twenty minute slog. But the view is incredible. I’m surrounded by undulating dunes striped with sandwaves.
Below, I can see an enormous colony of cormorants and a few flamingos on the piece of land surrounding the lagoon. I sit here for a while, listening to the sound of birds wafting up from the beach.
We can’t stay too long because, well, we’ve only booked a half day tour, but it is possible to get stuck if the tide gets high enough to wash out the parts of the beach we need to drive on.
On our way back to Swakopmund, we do a little dune bashing, which is wild and exhilarating. It will make you want to own one of these Land Cruisers for yourself.
We stop on the beach near some fishermen and Bart finds a stunning prehistoric oyster – the shell has turned to stone over thousands of years. Now, they litter the beaches of the Skeleton Coast.
Finally, perhaps the strangest sight of the day, the Walvis Bay Saltworks. For acres and acres, shallow pink ponds of sea water dry in the sun, leaving their salt behind for crews to harvest for export.
Later in the afternoon, we take a flight with Pleasure Flights & Safaris over the Skeleton Coast for a different perspective.
In retrospect, the flight was not worth the price for me because the camera I was carrying was not good enough to capture quality images, but we did get to see one of the larger shipwrecks on the Skeleton Coast, the Eduard Bohlen.
We saw hundreds of seals on the beaches.
And the shapes of the dunes from above in the afternoon light was spectacular.
This is our last night in Swakopmund. Tomorrow we drive north into Damaraland, but first dinner at the Jetty 1905.
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Or go back to the Introductory Post.
