A Good Day in Swakopmund

Yesterday was a great day for me in Swakopmund. I spent the morning sandboarding on the giant sand dunes that surround the town. I did 4 runs standing up, snowboard style, and 3 runs going head first on a piece of press board (similar to what I did in New Zealand last year). It was a lot of fun, even though I was not so good at the stand up portion (the sand is much slower than snow and I lost speed too quickly in my turns to toe side and fell a lot), but the head first was a blast, particularly when I nearly took out the guy with the radar gun (I hit 75 kmh, roughly 45 mph). In the afternoon, I headed back out to the dunes, this time for a little fun riding ATV's all over the dunes. Having grown up near the shore and always being told to stay off the dunes, it was nice to finally be able to just go out and rip up the dunes. That being said, the dunes are mostly about 50 to 100 meters tall, and nothing we did to them changed them in the least. The rush of driving up the face of the dune and turning around at the top and heading back down (they call it doing roller coasters) was exhilarating, especially on the way down. And the occasional feeling of being slightly out of control got the adrenaline flowing nicely. Our group had such a good time on the quads that we decided to extend our stay in Swakop an extra day so we could go again.

After we leave Swakop tomorrow, we head to Sossusvlei in the Namib desert to climb a dune and witness the sunrise. The dunes are a wonderful shade of reddish orange, and the light the sun throws on them in the moments after sunrise is supposed to be amazing.