We’ve arrived at land(Walvis Bay, Namibia) after 10 days at sea. Everyone was happy to rush off the ship to be on dry, non-moving land. For the last few days on the ship we have had the rockiest water so far.
I celebrated by going on two excursions! One was a birding tour and the other was a drive in a Four-wheel drive vehicle to Sandwich Harbor. Both tours had many participants but they were separated into multiple vehicles. There were only 4 participants in my vehicle on the birding tour and 3 participants in my vehicle for the Sandwich Harbor tour. At least two vehicles stick together in case one gets stuck.
I was hoping for lots and lots of flamingos on the birding tour. There were plenty of flamingos but not the thousands and thousands I was hoping for.
We saw colonies of cape fur seals on the birding tour but the oddity for me was the number of dead young seals on the beach that were not eaten by predators. The young seals die from malnutrition or by being squashed by the big adult males when they are fighting for territory and females.
On the drive to Sandwich Harbor we saw all sorts of fun patterns on the sand dunes. Some of the dark patterns are made from iron that is in the sand. Our guide had a magnet and showed us that it was really iron by moving the magnet under a hand full of the dark ‘sand’ to show that it moved.
The Sandwich Harbor tour included driving up & down the sand dunes. On the drives down the face of the sand dunes, I offered my very exciting front seat view to the others in the vehicle but they declined.
Fun note regarding crossing the ocean- we had 5 time zone changes. Rather than changing 5 hours when we arrived at Namibia, we had 5 one-hour changes during the time at sea. It felt very different than airplane travel where the time changes all at once when you get there.
