To the Namibian Coast and into the desert

Monday.
The birds woke us at sunrise with their strange twitterings; they are quite large birds, like starling, but they make sounds like I imagine budgies would make. By the time we were up and dressed and had started to pack away our tents Jason announced that breakfast was ready, and then, by the time we had eaten, he had finished pulling down our tents! It was all very efficient. Celso and Tris went for another short walk and took some fantastic pictures of a Hornbill that was warming up in the morning sun and some other small birds.
We got under way again to head West for a couple of hours to the coastal town of Swakopmund. This is one of the main summer time retreats for Namibians because it stays fairly cool in their summer. There is a cold current in the sea that brings cold water up from the south pole; this causes a nearly constant sea fog to hang over the coastal region and keep the temperatures right down. In the summer it is a pleasant mid 20's sort of temperature. However the fog is salty and so doesn't help to water the vegetation. In fact the whole coastal region here is desert with less than 5cm of rain per year and the salty fog reduces the variety of plants that can survive too. On the way into town we were lucky enough to pass 3 large male ostriches on the edge of the road; they are really funny birds, they look like ungainly ballet dancers in oversized tutus. They fled as we approached and got too close to each other so that one plumped up his feathers and got quite angry with the other. Strange, strange creatures.
Although we are staying in Swakopmund for the night, we drove another 30km south to Walvis Bay where there is a lagoon full of Greater Flamingos, grey juveniles and slightly pinkish adults. They were all doing some very serious dancing, stirring up the mud to release the crustaceans. It was very funny to watch - see the video! There was also some serious fights going on between various adults - I assume it was over the females but we don't know how to spot the difference between male and female. It was all very ungainly.
Back in Swakopmund, we booked into our hotel and then went out to get some lunch and then go down to the craft market. It is never a peaceful affair at the market here, the vendors are constantly on your back, offering you goods, showing you things, telling you prices and then asking you to bargain..... it is all very exhausting. Since we were about the only buyers in the area we were very popular and caused several arguments to start between the various stall holders where a vendor started to talk to us when we were not at their stall but at anothers. Anyway... we bought some great stuff and spent several hours trying to find out if we could get the most amazing Rhino home. He was 25kg, that was the problem, the post office would only send up to 20kg and we know that our airline only takes bags up to 20kg too - something to do with the Union rules about baggage handlers and the maximum weights they will handle in one package. So we couldn't even get it home paying excess baggage. A most incredible carving but sadly not to be. However we do have the most gorgeous giraffe, a pair of fantastic masks, a small elephant and a stone Hornbill.
Laundry and showers done, we went out for supper and ate Ostrich Stroganoff (the meat seems to have a taste sort of in between pork and beef), it was yummy.

Tuesday 8th June
Another 7am start so that we were ready to go by 8am. We headed into the desert in a 4x4 truck. Once in amongst the dunes we stopped to deflate the tyres to only 0.8bar so that the car would get more grip and then we were told a bit about the desert here. The Namib desert is one of the oldest deserts on earth and stretches all the way up the coast of Namibia from South Africa in the South to Angola in the North. (I don't know how you tell it's age, maybe from dating the first solid layers underneath the sand layers?). They are finding new things everyday, like a mushroom that grows on the dune or new species of geckos.
The part of the desert we were in is one of the driest places on earth and is now being protected because diamonds have been found.... where they found diamonds in the south Namib desert is started a frenzy of people driving through the desert and damaging the ecosystem, they don't want that happening here so access is all under lock and key.
We drove a short way with our newly deflated tyres when Francois, our portly, chain smoking, very Africans guide leapt from the van and threw his hat into some low succulent plants on the side of a dune, then down on hands and knees he started to sift the sand through his fingers, and after a few seconds returned with a small Shovelnosed sand-diving lizard, you could definitely see his shovelnose and also his long digging toes. When released he ran sooooo fast, it was incredible; apparently they have been clocked at 45kph; and then he disappeared into the sand in one smooth dive. We then continued our drive going really fast up the side of a dune and stopping right on the brink, we all gave a sigh of release we thought he was going to plunge us over the other side.... but after a short stop and a wander that is exactly what we did, down the other side so that all you could see out of the windscreen was the ground below and we were all slipping forward of our seats, it was terrifying and exhilerating, we did a few more of these later but more in the style of a rollercoaster with just a brief halt at the top so that we could contemplate our doom and then losing our stomachs as we descended down the other side. Our other encounters were with a legless skink that had a sort of white plate over its nose to help it force its way through the sand; another, larger, Shovelnosed sand-diving lizard that was very angry and bit onto the first thing it could grab including Francois' finger and he then passed it on to another of our fellow passenger's ears; a tiny, burrowing gecko that is practically see through and could not be taken out in the sun, 2 male chameleons sitting in dollar bushes and very glad to be fed a few meal worms and beetles, (there must have been a female around somewhere but we couldn't find her), when one chameleon was moved from his bush out onto the sand he turned from green to a pale yellow in a matter of seconds, incredible creatures; several black and a couple of white beetles with extremely long legs that could run really fast; a little bird, a Chat, that followed us for about 10 mins and then took meal worms from the hand; and finally a sidewinder adder that having been extracted from the sand then buried himself again in a matter of seconds until only his head was sticking out... you could so easily tread on one without seeing him.
We were back at our hotel before 1:30pm; Delphin had told us that we needed to get going so that we would make it to our next campsite before dark in the Naukluft National park; but then they, Delphin and Jason, farted around for over an hour and a half doing shopping, getting petrol and other stuff before we actually got going. So of course we ended up driving over an hour in the pitch dark at the end of the journey and putting up the tents in the dark too. But the journey was interesting, we had about 50km of paved road and then after that it was gravel, quite a good road but with a few hairy dips and bumps. As we headed back inland from the coast the sandy desert slowly gained more and more vegetation, scrubby bushes and tufts of dry grasses, we saw loads of Bustards but failed to get any photos, Oryx, Eagles, large black and white crows (that I thought were vultures at first they are so large!), bat eared foxes, jackals, another type of fox, Springboks and several ostriches.