Sand Drift

Luderitz

The German influence can be seen in these colourful houses

I was really looking forward to Luderitz because of the photos we had seen of the nearby ghost town of Kolmanskop. With no-one there to shovel the sand off the road or to close the windows, the sand is slowly taking over the abandoned once lavish houses.

The house on the left is so dangerously dilapidated that you can't enter it.
Most of the houses single storey, only a few are two storey which belonged to the architect and other VIP's. 

We arrived at lunchtime and went straight to the only place in town that could fix anything to do with cars to see if we could get the soldering for our inverter done correctly - third time lucky. There was another traveller there getting a side window fixed as they had been broken into. We both went to the supermarket which was a really nice one but Lindsay started feeling uneasy and sent me back to look after the car. It was Saturday and unbeknown to us the supermarket was about to close and most of the shops already had. There is no Saturday afternoon or Sunday trading in Namibia.

We thought we needed a permit to photograph the ghost town, so was really annoyed that the shop that sold the permits was closed. After lunch we went back to Kolmanskop Ghost Town which is about 10kms out of town, but it was closed too. It’s the main tourist attraction in the area, what was going on?

We tried to make sense of the permit rules and opening times, went back to the shop and looked at theirs. You can only buy the permit from the shop and we didn't know if they were open on Sundays as they had only posted their summer opening hours and it was winter. We gave up and decided we would just turn up on the Sunday at the opening time of 8am and hoped we could buy our entry tickets there. We got there early to be first in so that we could get some photos without other people in them. It turns out that you don’t need a photography permit to photograph inside opening hours, it is only for sunset to sunrise like the Quiver tree forest. Seeing as we only really wanted to take photos inside, we didn’t need one after all. The place is quite large and there are a number of buildings to choose from. Where to start? We asked the man who sold us our tickets and he said the ones up the far end - of course they were! All of the photos taken inside are between 2 and 4 photos blended to get the light right.

So glad they put colour on their walls!

Included in your entrance fee is a guided tour at 10am. So we had two hours to take photos before the tour, which was just enough. This is an excellent tour and you hear about how the town started. They were mining for something else and a worker gave his boss a stone he had found on the ground. It turned out to be a diamond. Not long after people had started staking out claims, the German government took over and made it compulsory that only companies could mine here. The town had a  school, ice works, butchery, general store, bowling alley, gym/concert hall and hospital. They had the first x-ray machine in Namibia and while it may have come in handy if anyone was sick it was actually to make sure no-one had swallowed any diamonds. The richest person in town was the store owner. She could get you anything shipped from South African or Germany. There was a railway in town that took everyone to her store. Every day each household was given a block of ice for their ice chest free of charge, when that melted it was used as drinking water. Water was originally brought in by ship. At one point it was cheaper to bath in champagne than water. The town declined after WWII.

We stayed at the national parks campsite called Shark Island which now has a permanent causeway connecting it to the mainland. It’s right on the coast so can get a bit windy. The ablution blocks are woeful they are old and in need of maintenance, which is not good enough for the price they are now charging. One campsite actually had grass but as we didn't want to leave anything out we lost it when we left to go sightseeing.

Shark Island campsite

Lindsay started to get worried about how long it would take to get to Sossusvlei and decided that we would leave here a day early even though we have paid for another night.

During the first afternoon we went for a drive to do some local sight seeing to the south of town doing a loop to Diaz Point where the first Portuguese explorer arrived in the 1488. Along the way we came across some flamingoes.

There is a cross at the top of the rocks but I didn't notice it as I only interested in these pylons

The air at the coast is noticeably less dry than further in. Lindsay thinks it's the water drying out our skin, but I think it's the air. Our skin is loving being near the coast.

This old railway siding house is on the main road from Aus to Luderitz. 

Distance from Quiver Tree Rest Camp to Luderitz - 352kms on bitumen, 3:21 hrs approx.

Want to start at the beginning of this trip? Namibia - Pt 1