Saturday, 28 January 2012

We are sorry to be leaving Swakopmund. I suppose we have to start being responsible at some point in our life.

We travelled up the west coast via Henties Bay where we stopped for a cup of coffee, to The White Lady Lodge.

We toured the camping area which was too a little too rustic for Lynne (but at least it wasn’t organic!). We stayed anyway. Philip decided to do the hike into the Brandberg (translation: Burning Mountains) mountains to view the Bushmen paintings which are supposed to be about 2,000 years old (sounds old). As it was midday with the temperature hovering around 42oC, Lynne decided to sit in the comfortable lodge lounge sipping lime and soda water. Philip drove 18km to the start point of the 6km hike.

Bushman Paintings

To view the paintings, you pay an entrance fee and are assigned a guide. Johnny was Philip’s guide and took him to the official cave for tourists and a couple of other bushman caves. Johnny spoke poor Afrikaans, very little English and a couple of German words. Between hand signals, mixture of German, English and Afrikaans he shared a lot of knowledge of the geology and plants that we came across. On our return to the starting point, Philip unpacked clothes that he wanted to give away and handed them to Johnny along with a tip for his efforts.