After a lovely lunch of cold meats, cheeses, salad & the most delicious homemade wholewheat bread (which is round as it is baked in an old Ricoffy tin - now that's what I call recycling), Jansen drives us back to the airstrip for the next leg of our journey. Sadly, I only thought about asking for a bread making demo (& the recipe) when it was too late....
We head back out to the coast again....Namibia has a low average rainfall and the rivers are usually seasonal (above ground) and as we fly over you can see the channels made by the water as well as the beautiful patterns made by the silt carried in the water from the interior.....
Finally one of the rivers makes it all the way to the sea...
A little further up the coast we come to Terrace Bay......which is the starting point for the afternoon activity....the roaring dunes....
We land at the northern end of the settlement at the hangar where our appropriately coloured trusty (& rusty) Landrover is waiting for us...
On this trip it has become customary to refer to mechanical failures as 'mother-in-law problems'....so while Andre deals with his mother-in-law problem we stretch our legs by walking down to the beach...reminds me of English shingle beaches & the water is just about the same temperature too...
Andre swings round to pick us up....I think the mother-in-law might need a bit of a face lift as well!This afternoon we are visiting the roaring dunes...Andre was not giving anything away until we had experienced it for ourselves...I had heard them before but kept quiet so as not to spoil it....you all sit in a row on the crest of a sand dune and then shuffle down the dune on your bottom....as you do so a curious hum emanates from deep underneath you...a sound that people who have experienced the Second World War liken to the sound of a squadron of bombers.....it certainly is most bizarre...not all dunes sing or roar....as far as I can make out it has to be windblown particles of sand that are of a certain size...we all did it once, then I took pictures of the others second time round....going down is the fun bit. Hiking back up to the top - that's the tough bit.....
There is a constant wind blowing here so I had to be really careful of my camera....sand in camera is a bad, bad thing....as Paul discovered when his camera jammed after this jaunt....most of these were taken with my kikoi wrapped around the entire camera with just the lens peeping out....
This photo is now the screensaver on my laptop.....you can see the wind blowing the sand down the dune..
After this I went up on to the roof of the vehicle & managed to get some nice pictures of the dunes...the shapes & colours are just gorgeous...
There are no roads here...it's straight down the dune face.....doubly exhilarating if you are on the roof of the vehicle at the time...
We encounter another mother-in law problem....specifically overheating so nothing a short break won't fix...
That was lovely - each & every experience on our trip has been different & unique....
Once again we head inland over a few oases - some the result of a river that can't get to the ocean due to sand dunes blocking the way & others the result of an undergound spring....
Welcome to Leylandsdrift......just a lone Landrover sans driver waiting for us in the middle of a wide open plain.....
Comments