Swakopmund adventures :)

I confess I didn't take this photo - but I wanted everyone to see Swakop beach!

Swakop is a beach town and so for a few days we enjoyed the luxury of just lying on a beach and swimming in the sea. One day there were wild dolphins and so Ben and I swam out until we were only a few meters away from them which was incredible. On the swim out to the dolphins we met an American, an Australian and a Canadian (sounds like the beginning of a bad joke!) and I couldn't help but laugh at their shocked reaction when they realised that a girl had managed to swim so far out :O

Of course the inevitable happened and we all got burnt. Particularly me, who is often referred to by our kids as the 'white, white, white, white, WHITE' volunteer! Inevitably there was a couple of days of pain, although thankfully it did teach all of us a lesson. I think the problem was that in Tses its simply too hot to stand in the sun, it has already become a habit for Daisy and I to seek shade whenever we can. But Swakop is COLD, and windy, so I suppose naively we forgot that the sun was just as hot as it always is. Lesson learnt!

While we were in Swakopmund the others went quad biking (I decided not to go since I had been burnt on the back of my legs and therefore felt the pain was not quite worth the pain) but the next day I did go sand boarding which was a brilliant experience.

There are two types, lying down - where you literally hold onto a rectangular piece of wood and slide down a sand dune until you stop (or crash) and the standing  up type, which is almost exactly the same as snowboarding. The others all decided to do the lying down type, but I couldn't resist standing up! It was a great day although I must confess that the company's decision to make us walk up the sand dunes instead of quad biking up soon seemed like a very stupid idea!!!! (The company aims to leave as little an impact on the environment as they can, so I suppose I can see the logic behind the decision).

As I soon realised, sand boarding and snowboarding are not as similar as you might think. If you go slowly when sand boarding, you quickly begin to sink underneath the sand. And if you attempt to turn when not going quickly then it is almost impossible. However, saying this to someone who has only snowboarded for a couple of weeks a few years ago was not going to make much of a difference! I managed fine as long as I wasn't trying to turn! It was then that the problems started (problems such as falling over, covering myself in sand and also somehow managing to do a back flip in the process!)

There was an absolutely adorable moment though, when Halo, the three year old daughter of one of the instructors decided to help me wax my board. I didn't have the heart to tell her that the board doesn't need to be waxed four times in a row, and so just sat there waiting until the adorable little girl had decided that her work was finished and wandered off to find her dad. So cute!


The day's excitement didn't end there though. As we were getting into the kombi to go home the door fell off! Their attempts to fix it failed and so for the whole of the journey home Ben had to hold the door shut - gottta love Namibian health and safety! In a way, it truly is refreshing :)  And of course, as you can imagine, the shower was VERY sandy once we all got back to the hostel!