Namibia. Part II: Swakopmund & The Namib Desert

Part II: Swakopmund & The Namib Desert

All photos were taken by my husband, Steffen Irmscher and I.

You know, thinking back on my time in Namibia I realized that it’s actually quite a mad place. I don’t mean angry. No, the people are lovely, welcoming, and just a delight. I mean, certain things about the country are completely insane, kooky, just tripping on fairy dust.

The first thing you notice when reading up on Namibia is that it’s large. I mean, it’s really big. We often found ourselves staying at places where the nearest town was a 2-hour drive away. That’s the first mad thing, right here. If you’re surrounded by dust, huge stretches of nothingness and wild animals – you might want to make sure there are other people nearby in case you find a clan of hyenas in your backyard up to no good, there’s a power outage or your car battery died.

Also, the regular rule of thumb is if you drive on the highway you’ll roughly cover a 100km in an hour. In Namibia, however, you can easily double that time and maybe you’ll have a rough estimate of how long it just might be. Travelling there is a gamble. You don’t know the condition of the roads (they could basically change overnight) or if you’ll run into wildlife. 

The third mad thing is, if you find yourself on a bad road, that might just be your only option. We frequently came across only one road leading to where we wanted to go and the same road for coming back. Now imagine if it’s 300km long, riddled with potholes, and hungry baboons, you’re pretty much out of luck and have a good idea of our journey from Etosha National Park to Swakopmund.

Now please don’t find any negativity in me calling an entire country mad. I honestly think if this place weren’t so insane, I wouldn’t have enjoyed it half as much. Who doesn’t enjoy the nutty aunt or uncle in the family? This quirky attribute made everything so much more interesting and made every day feel like an adventure where anything could happen. Now, that’s the kind of attitude and excitement you want when exploring the unknown!

  

Swakopmund was the first stop where we would meet up with two more from our party. We decided on this location because one of my friend’s lived in the neighboring town while growing up and his face always beamed when reliving his time there. That and also the fact that Swakopmund and Walvis Bay not only look, sound but also feel German, was enough to attract me for a quick visit. Having just arrived a week earlier from Germany, I was curious what a German type of town in the middle of the Namib Desert would look like. Boy, it did not disappoint. We were sitting in a café eating Strudel in Swakopmund one afternoon when it hit me: if I ignored the palm trees outside, I could swear I was a normal café somewhere in rural Germany. Everything from the music, décor, and food to the guests were unmistakably German. My German husband fitted more to the little café in Southern Africa than the 3 Africans sitting by him at the table.

Put the Brötchen and Hefeweizen aside, this was clearly still Southern Africa. Swakopmund is sandwiched between the powerful Atlantic and the ancient Namib Desert. Imagine a long unwinding road ahead of you and on your right are massive waves crashing down and retreating back to an immense ocean and on the right, you see larger than life sand dunes expanding off into a vast desert. Sand and blue as far as the horizon – that’s what you’ll find here. The giants of nature untouched and gleaming in full glory.

Between Swakopmund and its neighboring town, Walvis Bay, lies the giant of dunes: Dune 7. Some say it’s the largest in the world at 300 meters, but no one is really a 100% confident that that is in fact correct. It’s at least the highest in that area.  

Being surrounded by this neverending mass of sand with its gigantic dunes and primeval presence I felt small and curious. Reading up about it was a bit of past time for me when I wasn’t pouring sand out my shoes. A fun fact about the Namib is that’s it’s actually one of only two coastal deserts in the world. The other one is the Atacama Desert in Chile. Another is its name, which quite fittingly, means "vast place”. It sprawls 2,000 kilometers along the coasts of not only Namibia but also Angola and South Africa – “vast place” is spot on in my opinion.

Next up is the windswept Lüderitz caught in the grasps of the German Sperrgebiet ("Prohibited Area") and a once very rich mining village, now a ghost town hidden among the dunes of the Namib Desert. The madness continues.