Day Sixteen – Alsop Aboard and Desert Adrenaline

This morning was different. We were going to have a new friend, our threesome was going to become a foursome, and we had to set off early to collect Emma from the airport. We did a quick tour of Windhoek allowing Emma to buy a 50% life size wooden replica of a hippo crafted over seven years from fifteen trees by indigenous tribesmen who have never seen a ‘white devil’ before. All at 50% discount from the start price.

We had a days’ drive to get to the coast at Swakopmund ready for massive adrenaline thrills and everything else they promise in the old German town on the coastal edge of a desert. We’d planned a ‘road less travelled’ route through the desert to get there but 40kms in we had to perform an about turn after reading in the Lonely ‘I made this book up and everything is totally amazing’ Planet, that our campsite was in a US$50 per person per day national park with a campsite fee of US$100 plus 7 quid per person! I think they may have trained Springbok serving you their own fillets for that price but I can’t be sure. Like I said, we performed an about turn and hit the main road for Swakopmund.

Five 90kmh hours later we arrived at the Desert Sky Backpackers. We booked our sand boarding adrenaline hit for the next morning and went out for a beer. The public house of choice was a converted tug boat, now incorporated into a building on land that served Camelthorn beer from a local microbrewery. That ticked several boxes.