Posts From Namibia

Sylvester is a very famous Cheetah, he even has his own Facebook Page. The non profit organization associated with Elephant Camp acquired Sylvester from the Zimbabwe Nation Park Service via a tender process. They won that tender because their proposal was to have Sylvester join an education program that already included the camp elephant families. The good news for us was that, as guests of the camp, we got to spend some time with him.

We four had always planned that our time on the Zambezi Queen would be a time to relax and catch up on sleep after the rigors of our various safaris and so it turned out. Three nights and two and a bit days of sun, water and nothing to do except relax, sleep and casually watch the many animals on the banks and in the waters of the Chobi River. Of course there was one challenge facing us in these days, the challenge of not drinking and eating too much. We probably all scored a B on that subject.

As mentioned in yesterdays post, Capetown was a changeover point from one cruise to the next. It was also a point at which there was a chnage over for a lot of the staff. We noticed this last night at dinner with a lot of new faces amongst the restaurant staff. So today the Captain (who has not changed) held a cocktail party to introduce the new members of his senior staff.

This morning we pulled into the port of Luderitz, a small town or village, in southern Namibia and at the southern end of the Namibian Desert which is called The Namib. The country of Namibia is famous for this coastal desert, which is the oldest desert in the world, and which runs the full length of the Namibian coast, starting in South Africa and running north into Angola. As you can see from the photos below the desert is a mix of sand and stone and is very dry getting on average about 15mm of rain per year.

This morning we pulled into the harbor of a town called Walvis Bay which is the main sea port for Namibia. It has a long history of contact with Europeans dating back to 1485 when nearby Cape Cross was visited by Diogo Cao and 1487 when Bartolomeu Dias anchored in Walvis Bay itself. Interestingly while Walvis Bay is one of the few places on the Namibian coast that provides good anchorage for ships it has no natural water supply even today. That handicap explains the near by town of Swakopmund which sits at the mouth of the similarly named Swakopmund River and hence has a water supply but does not have any form of protected acnhorage for ships. So the two towns are somewhat symbiotic. Swakopmund provides the water and Walvis Bay provides a lifeline to the rest of the world. Incidentally the names reflect their earlier colonial history with Walvis Bay being English and Swakopmund being German. Tourism is the main business of both towns.s