Gem and Stu’s World Tour

We left Swokopmund (reluctantly got on the truck as it was nice to have a few days ‘off’) early and had a long days driving through the Namib desert - we stopped for lunch at a funny little place called Solitaire. It was in the middle of absolutely nowhere and it looked like a town from the wild west - we had lovely apple pie there though!

Strangely enough the desert was greener than usual because there had been some rain in the last couple of days…

Later in the afternoon we met a guide who took us (in the back of the smallest pick up in the world) to the dunes. We walked to Deadvlei which was the ‘dead’ part of the dunes that the river no longer flowed to. It was amazing and quite eerie (especially with the rain coming in). The guide was hilarious and kept on giving us lectures on how to be good wives! He was a good dancer though!

We then drove a little further to Dune 45 which is a high dune that you are permitted to walk up. It was rather high and the walk up quite hard but the view from the top was worth it (Stu even managed to go a little higher than me). From the top we saw a sand storm in the distance and it came closer and closer to us. When it hit I had sand in places I did not even know you could get sand! The dune was really cool - especially the run down it!

After a night in the rain (again) we got up early to drive to Fish River Canyon. But then it all went a bit wrong! At about 9am Ronnie (our driver) asked us to get off the truck as he was not sure if he could make it up the big hill in front of us (especially as the roads were quite bad due to all the rain) - he did this a lot in case he crashed when doing the diffucult bits of driving. Anyway, off the truck went (to get some speed up) and we followed up the big hill (getting VERY wet in the rain) only to find when we got to the top the truck was bogged. Ronnie tried to get out but every time he did the truck kept slipping towards the edge!

Anyway, to cut a very long story short (and to gloss over the tanrums and arguments) we managed to get the truck free, 7 1/2 hours later with the help of 5 pick-up trucks that happened to be passing (we had not seen many overland trucks for the whole of the day and I was resigned to think we were going to have to camp that night). At one point we decided to take all our stuff off the truck as we thought it was going to go over the edge!

Too late to make it to the Fish River Canyon (and by that point people were just pleased not be bogged) we just drove to the next town to camp. On the way however, the heavens opened and I was not loving the prospect of camping. Luckily the campsite at the next town was flooded so we had to stay in a hotel (4 to a double room - 2 on the floor) - you might say I was so relieved (and me and Stu got to sleep in the bed)!