Day 7: Swakopmund and Walvis Bay
The Hansa Hotel, with its beautiful garden, is ideally situated in old town Swakop.
We spent a pleasant morning out and about the town. Firstly, doing a few chores like laundry and sorting out permits, both were pretty painless.
We then wandered around the towns and markets, finding a wonderful book store, with old edition books. Feeling peckish, as we had not eaten breakfast, we had a great snack at Cafe Anton at the Hotel Schweizerhaus. I’m sure this town is more German than Munich.
We then headed off to explore Walvis Bay. We drove through the holiday resort area of Long Strand and went down to the beach, the water was far too cold for a swim.
In Walvis we headed to the flamingo colony and into Dorob National Park. A strange area as it is clearly protected and appears to be a type of natural bird sanctuary but also a salt mine.
We spent a couple of happy hours birding, finding lots of water birds that we don’t see in the South African bush.
We then explored the harbour area and had a delicious lunch of oysters and cheesy prawns.
After chilling for a bit this afternoon, it was time to head off to dinner. All we seemed to do today was eat. Our restaurant of choice was Jetty Restaurant 1905. The wooden jetty was originally constructed in the early 1900’s, with the purpose of offloading cargo from ships. Over the years it fell into disrepair and was reopened in 2006. It is now a tourist attraction, used by fisherman and boasts a restaurant with icon views of the sunset. We enjoyed our meals of seafood and white wine, while the restaurant gently swayed with the crashing waves.
Not wanting a perfect day to end we had a night cap in the old pub at the hotel.
Pandas in Africa 