The Long Way Dune!

The drive to the Atlantic coast went smooth even if the environment was harsh. The Skeleton Coast or As Areias Do Inferno (The Sands of Hell) as the first Portuguese explorers called it gets it's nicknames from the large number of boats which got shipwrecked in the fog along the rocky shallow coastline and the unfortunate sailors who crawled ashore only to find an unforgiving ocean of sand. Today the only skeletons we saw were those of many seals who had washed ashore, but later at Cape Cross we would find a colony of over 100,000 live seals, allthough the extremly lazy albeit very cute animals could often be mistaken for dead.
After surviving the drive on the beach we got to the small town of Swakopmund, while the others decided to do some sandboarding I opted to stay and see what the town had to offer. Swakopmund is often said to be more German than Germany and I could understand this as the weather was the same miserable, grey and wet weather that I experienced in Berlin at the start of this trip. Weather in general has been getting colder for the past month or so as the days are usually warm but at night temperatures have dropped below freezing. The town itself had some German charm with small churches, cafes and brauhauses but once again I felt it was an artificial place built up to please tourists.
The next day we pushed on south and reached Sessriem which is the base for exploring Sossuvlei and the massive sanddunes in the area. We got up bright and early to witness the famous sunrise over the desert but somehow we managed to choose a day in one of the world's driest ecosystems when it rained so the clouds blocked any amazing phenomenon that may have occured. It cleared up later though and the landscape that unfolded infront of us was incredible, huge mounds of sand as far as the eye could see shifting in different shades of red and gold. We spent the day walking along the giant spines of the dunes and taking in the scorched landscape and then drove on south once more. Our next stop was yet another impressive sight, The Fish River Canyon.
Depending on how you count Fish River Canyon is the second or third largest canyon in the world after The Grand Canyon in the United States (The Blue Nile Gorge in Ethiopia is deeper but not as long or wide.) We drove around the rim of the canyon which if you excuse the pun was gorge-ous, for a while and then headed to the Ai Ais at the southern end of the park. The Ai Ais are natural warm springs but the water is pumped into pools and to be honest it felt very similar to being in a heated kiddie-pool. It was pretty nice to get clean though after some very dusty and sandy activities and it revived us for the long drive which awaited in the morning. As the Land Rover which has served as my mode of transport and accomodation drove me across yet another border into South Africa it was funny to think how I had originally intended to just join the guys for a short lift into Botswana, and had no intentions of really seeing much of these parts as public transport here is pretty much nonexistent. Now almost a month later they still hadn't gotten rid of me and I had seen so many amazing places which would never have been possible without the help of my three fellow Swedes. A symbolic flat tyre on the last day of driving was the the only hiccup on the 15 hour drive which took us to the goal that we had all set up when leaving Sweden... Cape Town!!!