Namibia Take Two

I haven’t been able to post for almost a week as I have been locked out of Travellerspoint. I don’t know why, but here I am on the last morning and boom, I am on again.
Our trip has been great. New places, new people and the freedom from our last two years of Covid ups and downs has felt amazing. In Namibia the numbers are low and the population is so spread out that I hardly worried about getting ill.
We were supposed to be at the Omaanda lodge for the last few days but found it so disappointing we packed up after one night and went back to Windhoek. This turned out to be such fun, we met up with friends and had some great meals, too. I think the best was at the Butcher Block. We sat outside, had great service, excellent wine from SA and the foood was outstanding. Wish we had something like that at home.
Now we’re are in Johannesburg where we hung out with family yesterday. It was cool and rainy, but the love in our cousins home was warm. I wished we could be together more often.
I still have great photos but my devices are not cooperating so hopefully I will add some more when we get home.
Our two days in Johannesburg have also been good for us to take stock of what we have done and getting everything in order to go home.
It’s funny, we arrived in SA April 20, we each had a passport and our vaccine card. We showed this to immigrations and at all the health checks and they waved us through.
Saturday afternoon on May 7, we arrived back in SA with the same papers and the health check stop told us we needed a QR code and the vaccine card was not good enough. We were sent to stand in line at some sort of health office and madly searched the CVS app to find any info about our vaccines. I found in my history the RX with the same date as my booster and with a little help from our escort we managed to go throught to immigrations.
Yesterday we had a PCR test and we have negative results on an email, a printed copy and a photo on our phones. I am confident this will be enough to board our flight later today.
Yesterday we also heard that there is a shortage of fuel at the airport. The port in Durban has not recovered from the massive rainfall a moth or so ago and this is were the fuel is coming from. Apparently, some of the flights from yesterday flew to others airports to get fuel after leaving here.
I guess we are in for our final adventure of the trip today, hopefully no great surprises!
So after a bit more coffee, it’s off to the mall for some shopping and then back pack up and go.
We love traveling but it is time to come home, feeling grateful for what we have experienced and look forward to the next adventure.

We often say we are in the middle of nowhere and I think we have been in more remote and perhaps harder to reach places than we are at now, but it feels like the middle of nowhere. We are here on the skeleton coast in what was previously South West Africa and now Namibia, on this very tiny spit of sand just off Walvis Bay, it feels quite remote to say the least.
We are staying at the Pelican Point hotel. This was formerly the house for the harbor master and the his control room at the top. This is our room, converted from control room to guest room, windows all around with a 360 degree view. The light house is almost close enough to touch from our deck. With the roaring of the mighty Atlantic Ocean on one side, sand, seals, birds and jackel all around, it feels a bit like a ship wreck.
On the side east of us you can see large ships and the port of Walvis Bay and the other side the crashing waves of the Atlantic Ocean with seals hollering in the background, it is all very surreal.
Aside from all that, what makes it seem even more remote is that this place is run on a generator. It gets turned on around 6 AM until after breakfast, a bit around lunchtime and then again from 6 PM until 9, but we asked for 10 PM and they have obliged that request. The staff are all Namibian friendly, lovely people who are happy to accommodate us as best as they can with what they have here. Supplies are all delivered including water! There is no quick trip to the store for milk or eggs. Even though we have a 4 X 4 we parked in Walvis Bay and were picked up, not sure anyone who has not been here before could find their way here.
Nature all around in such a raw environment, even the Namibian staff here have said to me that they can’t believe this exists in their country. We are surrounded by jacket, white pelicans, flamingos many species of birds, many, many seal colonies and whales and dolphins at certain times of the year. Yesterday we rode the dunes south of here and today kayaked with the seals in the calm morning water.
Remote, rustic, historic and a super sensory experience. The sun, the sand and the sea all make for a fantastic get away.

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We planned the stop in swakopmund just to allow us a little down time before the next destination, which was isolated and not easy to get to.
Although all the camps we stayed at so far were great and had all the comforts of home, it was really nice getting to the hotel in a small city with all the mod cons! We even turned the TV on and took advantage of the WiFi. Good AC, great water pressure in the shower, lots of room and an ocean view. We even bumped into some people we met in Okonjima who were checking in at the same time as us and arranged to meet them for drinks later to catch up.
We dropped our bags and went for a walk in the town which is a mixture of old colonial German architecture and more modern buildings. There are lots of cute little boutiques, coffee shops and bakeries. Our drive took up most of the day so we head back to the hotel to meet our friends downstairs at the bar and then dinner at TUG and old tug boat now restaurant and the food was quite good.
Sunday morning we packed up to move on.
But first we planned to meet a very special women who takes children in her home who are orphaned, come from underprivileged families or have health issues and need assistance. Presently she has six children living there and we promised to take her to the food store.

After a surgical shopping trip to the Spar we came back to her home to celebrate the confirmation of Anna, one of the young girls Elizabeth is very proud of. We were honored to spend time with them on such a happy day, they brought out the tables and chairs so we could enjoy the food in the sunshine. We arranged to swing by to pick up Anna in a couple days. All the children are off of school for the five week winter break and she will go home for a few weeks to see her family. It was just a coincidence that we are traveling that way and are happy to drop her off.
You can find out more about Elizabeth and the Sunshineupkids at this link: https://sunshineupkids.org/
By 3:00 pm we had to head out to Walvis Bay to catch our ride to Pelican Point Lodge . This is not a location we could drive to on our own. It is on a small spit of land in a national, only sand, sand roads as Allan says, “ are just a suggestion.”

We started our drive at Mowani Mountain Camp which is tucked away in the rocks and boulders of Damaraland. I guess you could say this is the high desert, temperatures in the 90’s even thought they are going into winter and so very dry. But all good things must come to an end and so we left for our next stop, iSwakopmund. The drive took us 4 or 4.5 hours and we took some very small sand and gravel roads. Even though the roads went on for miles and miles, we didn’t see one car for at least two hours. We went through tiny places like Granietkop and Anixab where there was a pretty large school, but no one around because it was Saturday. After that we passed a small house and I took some photos from the car window, an older women saw us and came to the road side stand where she had some crafts and rocks for sale. We got out to see what she had and her grandchildren came to see us, the older girl who spoke English asked for food. The ‘farm’ was dry and desolate, there may have been goats or cows somewhere, but we did not see them. It is hard for me to imagine how these people survive, but they are very smart and know how to use the plants and all the resources around them to survive. We bought some rocks and a bracelette and left them with some food we had for the car ride and peanut m and m’s I brought for the plane!
The little girl said she was so happy! We wished we had more to give them.

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Imagine living on the side of this road.

Because it is so remote, it is unlikely a passerby to stop and buy crafts or anything else they may have to sell very often.
The women is dressed in the traditional Herro fashion, with the long dress and the hat that looks like horns.
After that meeting we moved on through Uis, a ver small town and We stopped to refuel but with only one attendant, many cars waiting and the men with trays of rocks who were hoping to make a sale, we decided to go.
More sand roads to follow and then finally a tar road. It was ‘luxurious’ to take a Seinfeld reference! We picked up our speed and stopped in Henties Bay for gas and a coffee. Henties is a fishing village surrounded by some shipwrecks and what looks like small vacation homes. It was a good place to stop and stretch our legs.
Finally we reached Swakopmund. The center part of town shows the old buildings from the colonial time when Germany was governing the area. It is quaint with cute stores and restaurants.

Twyfelfontein is a world heritage site in a remote area of north central Namibia. It is about an hour east of Khoraxis on rocky, sand and soon to be paved roads.
The drawings here are from about 5,000 years ago and they can be seen quite clearly.
Only guided tours are available and the terrain is rocky and the temperatures are very hot. When we went yesterday it was at least 95 degrees F and there is no getting out of the sun.

The drawings are either teachings, about where things were, like water holes, animals and their hooves,
Or teachings from the Shaman.
These sites are protected and the guides are knowledgeable, if you are in Damaraland it is worth the visit, wear good walking shoes, a hat and bring water.