Wednesday 2020/01/01

Sesriem - Aus - Lüderitz

 

New Year sunrise in Namibia with desert view. What a great start to the year!

We are all better today and head south after breakfast.

The gravel road is fairly well drivable, but it also has a long sandy section that takes getting used to. The landscape is great and we feel like we are making 100 photo stops. In the mornings there is ice cream and coffee in Betta - a perfectly managed location that would have been a first choice for camping - if the time was right. In Aus we have a late, very good lunch in the Hotel am Bahnhof (hotel at the train station). The best address within a radius of at least 150 kilometers. We decide to continue towards Lüderitz today. On the route we meet the wild horses of the Garub-Pan, to which we make a short detour. The horses are very lean and look quite phlegmatic in the heat. We wonder how the horses survive here, like so often in the past few days here in the south.

We look at two options for wild camping, both of which are not really appealing, and drive on the paved road to Lüderitz. Pretty windy here. The courtyard of a backpacker accommodation doesn't seem ideal to us and so we drive to the NWR campground on Shark Island. There is a campsite there, but the wind is heavy and a restless night is inevitable (our tip: better plan your tour in a way that you don't camp in Lüderitz!). When setting up the tent, we offer a nice show for the other campground guests, most of whom come from South Africa. We finally clink glasses with our sparkling wine at the New Year. The tent flutters at night, but when the wind pauses, you can hear the waves lapping. We don't know why our vehicle's alarm system turns on again in the middle of the night.