Swakopmund

God, look at that, no itinery at all! Okay, I'm sitting in a hostel in Swakopmund, on the top bunk in a room for twelve. Up at 5am again, with apple pie for breakfast. I'm still waiting for it to warm up a bit, since my sleeping bag isn't doing the job, and I'm waking up, shivering, at 3am every day.

It was, by our standards, an 'average' journey of six or seven hours, with a few breaks along the way for toilets and photos. Bjorn also stopped every time we saw an animal. Evie, our SA-German-Kiwi dairy farmer, is incredibly good at spotting animals, and we'd call out to Bjorn to hit the breaks if Evie saw something he didn't. We were fortunate enough to see some 'mountain zebras', which are quite rare, apparently. After the eighth, 'look, zebras!', I'd stopped grabbing my camera. At one point, two were on the road, and we 'chased' them along it for about two hundred metres. We crossed the Tropic of Capricorn, too, and I posed for a couple of Mackins (see the footnote here).

So, before entering Swakopmund, we stopped at the 'Adventure Centre', which is a sort of admin centre for various local 'adventure and activity' companies. We watched a rather amateur dvd ('experiance (sic) the living desert'?) of all the things on offer, then booked. I'm going sandboarding, since I've always wanted to give it a whirl and see how close it is to snowboarding. K, his wife, and the two Spanish girls are skydiving. K said he'd done it before during his National Service, but it was fixed line, with no actual freefall. You have to do two years of service in South Korea, otherwise you get a 'red line on your identity card, which makes it harder to get a job, etc.. That's scarily similar to 'Starship Troopers', I thought.

So, we're at the 'lodge'. Dinner at half past six, and the two Australians are joining us. Sadly, we're losing Evie tomorrow, and I'm not sure who's going to tap me on the shoulder every time we go past an animal.