Today we have breakfast in the main dining room and what a spread it is and how very elegant is this room. We are overlooking the valley but there is no sun and the beautiful trees that we saw yesterday are shrouded in a layer of fog. Gee I am glad we got our pics yesterday. I tried prickly pear for the first time and it wasn’t too bad but the multitude of tiny hard seeds is a bit of a turn off. We met our local escort at 8.30am to transfer us to Johannesburg international airport for our flight to Walvis Bay in Namibia to rejoin the Arcadia. Johannesburg airport is very modern with lots of very nice shops. Apparently it was updated for the World Cup. Our flight was on time and our flight was approximately 2 hours to Walvis Bay. There wasn’t much scenery from the plane as it was mainly sand and nothing else… a bit like flying over the middle of Aus. On our arrival at Walvis Bay it was like being in the middle of a desert. Red sand for miles as far as the eye can see and no vegetation what so ever. The temperature was hot but not overbearing. We were on a relatively small plane but annoyingly it took us approximately 1 hour to be processed by immigration… VERY SLOW!!
We were met again by a local escort to be transported by mini bus back to the ship. The airport was about a 30 to 40 minute drive from the port so we got a chance to see a bit of Walvis Bay and I don’t think we missed much at all to be honest. A lot of passengers went on sand dune tours and dessert tours but we have done that before in Dubai and I don’t think it would be much different. Some did a sand buggy tour over the dunes and a number rolled their buggy and came back with an assortment of injuries. Travel insurance does not cover this activity and I think this tour was organised privately and not through the ship.
Our sail away from Walvis Bay was very pleasant sitting on our balcony with the usual drinks… P = Gin & Tonic, S = Jack Daniels and coke (light of course as less calories!!)
I bit of gossip… I don’t hear much but I do have a reliable source who told me that one of the ship’s crew who was an escort on one of the tours failed to return to the ship and was left in Walvis Bay. It would be the last place that I would want to be left at!
Now for some facts:
- Namibia is one of the largest countries in sub-Saharan Africa and the least populated.
- Situated on the South West coast of Africa
- Roughly about 4 x the size of GB
- Population 1.6 million – Walvis Bay population 46,000
- Namib desert the oldest in the world
- English is the official language
- Walvis Bay is the only port on the Skeleton Coast which is littered with shipwrecks.
- Famous for their pink flamingos that were nowhere to be found the day we were there
- Main sources of employment are the docks, fisheries and canning industries
- Currency is the Namibian dollar but US dollars and Rand are accepted in some places
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