Namibia, Camel Country

 

Walvis Bay, Namibia, 13 April 2025

When in Africa....

It is Palm Sunday morning as we pull into Walvis Bay while it is still dark.  We had heard our foghorn blowing while lying in bed and it didn’t stop until we were at our pier.  When it finally got light enough to see, it was still quite dense, and we could only make out shapes about 100 yards across the shipyard.

Dunes Mall

We did not schedule any excursions for this port, so we were in no rush to get ashore since we were going to be here until at least 6:30 PM.   We had a leisure breakfast and let the immigration line dwindle.  We finally cleared immigration about 9AM and left for the shuttle bus to take us to a large mall.
There were a lot of freelancers waiting there, offering to take us anywhere and everywhere there was to see.  We selected on young man and told him we needed to do some shopping first and he said he would escort us and show us around the huge mall.  I’m thinking he just wanted to make sure we didn’t hook up with someone else.  We visited a pharmacy and a Checkers grocery store and bought some items to take back to the ship.

We told him we wanted to see the flamingos, the dunes area, and ride a camel.  No problem, we negotiated a price of $120 US which we thought was fair for a 3-4 hour drive.  We would have paid much more for such an excursion on board.

Ramos

  His car was not new by any means, but clean inside and dusty outside and we chastised him about not being able to see through dirty windows.  Just roll them down when you want to take a picture he said.  His name was Ramos, and his wife had just delivered twins, boy and girl, last Christmas Eve.  His native language was Afrikaans, but he had a pretty good command of English, which is the official language here, but only 3% speak it as a home language.  Oshiwambo is the most common language, but Afrikaans is the most widely understood.  Here again, in this area at least, signage was all in English.

Our first stop was about a mile away to hopefully claim a geocache that was located by a park.  Ramos said he knew where we talking about, but he didn’t as it turned out.  We had to use Sue’s geocaching App to show him where to go.  He of course had no idea what we were doing.  

Looking for the cache, it turned out to be across
 the street, behind the padlocked door on the left!

Sue located it after a few mis-directions, and it turned out to be a small room with a padlock that must have been designed for a guard shack for the gated community it was by.  The padlock combination was 19 plus the address number of the nearest home.  We opened the door and there was the logbook on a shelf and our geocache mascot, Signal the frog, was painted on the wall! 

Sue logging in and Signal,
our frog mascot on the wall

We have never seen a container like this before.  We logged in and earned our Namibia souvenir.  Ramos was impressed!

Our first stop was the beach area where we saw hundreds, if not thousands, of flamingos.  The problem was, they were about a mile away.  He said they tend to congregate where the tourists can only get close to them by boat.  They were mostly white from what we could tell and had not yet taken on their pink color which comes from their diet.

Flamingos?, who knows!

Our next destination was the camel ride, which was located near the town of Swakopmund, a coastal city that offers a unique blend of German colonial architecture and cultural areas.  This city is on most excursions’ lists because of the architectural buildings of German heritage.  

We were not very interested but thought as long as we were here, we would take it in. 

Sand everywhere!

I should take a minute to mention that the most striking thing about this area is the lack of mountains or hills of any kind.  We have been so used to being around mountainous terrain and this is somewhat of a welcome break from that.  This area is known for its sand dunes and there are plenty of them around. 

Nice homes between desert and ocean
(can't see ocean because of fog)

As a matter of fact, the camel place also rents out four-wheelers to take out and play in the dunes.  Much like we have seen in the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico.  In this area, as well as others, the desert goes right down to the seashore.   Housing developments spring up occasionally to take advantage of the seascape, and I assume the cooling affect it has.

Camel Corral

We arrive at the Rent a Camel place and Ramos introduces us to our camel guide for our half hour ride.  We paid our fee of NAD$390 each, about US$20, and were joined by another couple.  We went through the process of boarding the camels after our guide commanded them to kneel.  These camels are dromedaries, meaning they have one hump.  There is a saddle-like seat, complete with handrails and stirrups and we climb aboard like we would a horse, but we sit to the rear of the hump. 

Our rides await!

Ronald, I think he said that was his name, tied Sue's camel to mine so close that her camel’s head was right alongside my left shoulder.  He/she was chewing his/her cud and rubbing on me.  I hoped camels didn’t slobber much or I would be a mess before this was over.  I tried to make friends with him by scratching his cheek and rubbing his head which he seemed to enjoy.  Ronald left us to help the other couple get aboard and while he was doing that, Maxie, my camel, decided it was time to get up, and up we went, and of course Sue’s camel had to do the same. 

Just before Maxie decided to go back to the corral

I managed to stay in the saddle, but it was a good thing I was hanging on or I would have been back on the ground!  Well Maxie headed back to the corral thinking the ride was over, not so fast Maxie.  Ronald came and tied the other lead camel to Sue’s saddle and off we went heading up into the Namid Desert.  It was different than riding a horse, there was more movement, and you are up considerably higher, but it was fairly comfortable.  Fifteen minutes out, stop for a photo op and fifteen minutes back and cross another item off my Bucket List.

Stopping for a photo op

Video:  Saddle up!

Video:      Leaving the corral 

Video:  Starting our safari

We were scheduled to go into town, but Ramos said the police had a check point set up and he said if we went through it, the police would ask us to get out of his car and check our papers and want a bribe to let us go.  His solution was to have us walk back into the desert toward the highway and he would circle around and pick us up.  We, of course, did as he suggested and walked the half mile back to where he was waiting for us.  So, no town visit today but that was OK with us.

Kapana street scene

Ramos asked if we would like to see how the locals live and of course we did.  He took us through the villages of Sea Point and Kapana.  These were settlements of working-class people and some homes were extremely poor and others well cared for and decent. 

Street scene, Sea Point

typical housing in Sea Point

I commented that they were all dressed nicely, and he said that it was Sunday, (Palm Sunday as well), and that was part of the reason.  He pointed out several churches of different denominations, schools and business places.  These were obviously sleeper towns for people who left to work elsewhere.  He was on the phone with a friend of his and I recorded some of his speech so you could hear the Afrikaans language. 

Video:  Ramos speaking Afrikaans

After this he took us to Walvis Bay Salt Holdings, Ltd.  This company is the largest producer of solar sea salt in sub-Saharan Africa.  The company processes 100 million cubic meters of seawater per annum to produce more than 1,000,000 metric tons of high-quality salt per annum.  The salt is used for the chemical industry and other general purposes including high quality table salt for the southern Africa market.  And there just happened to be a virtual cache there.

Walvis Bay salt

Nearby is another major tourist attraction, Pink Lake.  It indeed has a pink color which is due to the presence of salt-tolerant algae that reacts with a particular bacterium which gives the pink color.  These bacteria have a pigment called carotenoids that gives the water a pinkish or reddish color.  This is the same pigment that colors the feathers of flamingos their distinctive pink.

These carotenoids flourish in high-salinity conditions like salt flats or salt lakes. Pink Lakes’s salty deposits remain after evaporation as result of high temperatures and low humidity.  Ramos digs down in the salt deposit and gives us a souvenir to take.  I sample the water by sticking my finger in it and licking and wow, it must be at its saturation point.

Pink Lake video

We ask Ramos to drop us off at a seafood restaurant near our ship and he obliges and says it will only be a short walk back to the ship.  We pay him a little extra for his excellent service and we enter the 54 Anchors waterfront restaurant which is quite busy, probably due to the ship being near and a Sunday outing for the locals. 

Sue orders a Ginger Squid and I a local draft.  We decided to just have appetizers of oysters, calamari and escargot.  It took a while to get them, but everything was worth the wait.  The raw oysters were small but excellent, the grilled oysters with mozzarella were a delight, the calamari were divine, and I think the escargot was even better than what we had on the ship, although they were a little smaller.

Seafood delight! 

The short walk back to the ship turned out to be about two miles!  We walked through the entire shipyard to get to the Queen.  A crew member at the gangplank asked where we had come from, so we had to explain our journey.  On board we had to check in with Namibia immigration to get stamped out and we were done for the day.  An excellent day as it turned out. 

Next stop, Dakar, Senagal.  It will take six sea days to get there on the 20th