H & I did our own walk this am. They offered us their radio but given there are no serious predators and a jackal is going to be more scared of me than me of him/her, I didn’t think it was necessary. We just walked on the road out of the camp and down to the helicopter pad and then on the road toward the staff village. We saw a few birds but nothing new for the trip. It was good to just walk by ourselves though.

After breakfast we headed back to our room and packed up and headed off to Swakopmund. It is basically a gravel road the whole way – about 375 kms. It started fine then got progressively worse. It was so bad at one stage that you really couldn’t go more than about 40 km/h. My hands took such a battering that I eventually had to stop driving and let H drive instead. She had a headache from the vibrations but she said it was slightly better for her to drive than be a passenger because she could at least anticipate what was coming.

The landscape was pretty bleak at times. There really was nothing to see at all. It was hard some times to distinguish the road from the rest of the landscape. If you don’t believe me – just look at the picture below.

H eventually said “This is the last time we are coming to Sossusvlei because I can’t handle the road to and from it”. I suspect she may be right. It was not a pleasant drive for much of the 4.5 hours. As we approached Walvis Bay the road became almost a tar road (it isn’t tar but felt as good as tar). The visibility also started to decline and so did the temperature. From a high of 36 C today, when we arrived in Walvis Bay it was down to 22 degrees.

We arrived in Swakopmund around 3pm and found our accommodation (though that wasn’t an easy task because we didn’t have data on our mobile phones). We are staying The Pier Apartments – they seem to be newly built and we have an apartment that has a balcony that can see the sea. Well equipped and everything is quite new still. Some design flaws (like the parking garage has the best sea views – not kidding!) but very comfortable. There is also a shopping mall right next door and basically connected to the apartments so very easy to do some shopping for food.

From our balcony we added a third lifer of the trip – Bank Cormorant. We didn’t really do much birding today as we were pretty shattered from the drive here but we did add 3 more to our trip list just from a short walk we did along the pier this evening.

As we are both tired we are heading to bed soon so until tomorrow …

P & H