On our way to Swakopmund, we detoured to visit the Cape Cross Seal colony.  Our photographs do not do the place justice, to really capture the spirit you would need a "smell camera"!  While it is an amazing sight seeing the thousands of seals lazing on the beach  the stench is something that needs to be smelt  to be believed.

 

Swakopmund is a very modern town, heavily German influenced situated on the Atlantic coast surrounded by the Namib desert.  Swakopmund is an adventure sport mecca, Africa's version of Wellington.  Some of the activities available are skydiving, sandboarding (laying or standing?), quad biking, deep sea fishing, microlight flights, small aircraft excursions and riding a flying fox (?).  With the limited time available to us, we opted for sandboarding in the morning and quad biking in the afernoon.

 

Sandboarding offered us the chance to ride down the dunes at 80km/hr on our "high tech speed machines" ( translation - a piece of masonite, their phrase, not ours).  It also afforded us the pleasure of  getting sand in every orifice and down every piece of clothing - there was no escaping the inevitable mouthful of sand - eh, Donna??  Terrific fun sliding down, pit about the climb back up!!

 

Quad biking was a little more leisurly and was more like follow the leader through the sanddunes.  Spectacular scenery unfolded before us on our 50km trek through the desert.