Vacation! Many Seals and Much Driving

looking back to September 2016:

After our desert tour, we woke on Friday to a reasonably lovely morning for Swakop, continuing Kit and Karen's complete mis-education in Namibian weather.  We spent a bit of time at the flamingo lagoon -- I love them so -- and then clambered back into the bakkie and settled down for about a week of spending most of our waking hours therein.  More or less.  Kit did all the driving, and is a hero.  (Karen doesn't drive stick, and Peace Corps doesn't allow me to drive unless I'm on leave and insured, and we could not figure out the insurance language in the rental car agreement.)

Flamingos, both Greater and Lesser, and some kind of duck.

Also avocets, with the oddly upturned bills, and more ducks.

We headed north, stopping to see more lichens!  Kit and Karen were thrilled to be able to pull the car to the side of the C34, step over the low safety barrier keeping off-roaders off the lichen field, and tiptoe about, occasionally pointing or poking, until they'd had - for now - their fill.  Then it was back into the bakkie and onto the salt road -- these are common in the coastal area of Namibia.  The road is unpaved, with a surface of the local earth bed, which is mostly sand and salt.  Occasionally the roads authority sends a tanker truck to spray them with water (salt water, I think and very much hope given the dearth of fresh water in this area), and somehow they come out looking the same blue-black as a tarred road.  And they usually make for a very easy driving surface.  Often in areas where the local 'soil' gets wet, it forms into gypsum, a soft mineral that forms as a crystal, sometime creating 'desert roses' that the miners at Ûiba Ôas sell.

Desert roses - or calcium sulfate dihydrate, or gypsum.
Not the kind in which you drive.

We got offered a few crystals by informal vendors at the site of a quite boring shipwreck.  I get all my crystals at Ûiba Ôas, but these guys had spent time and energy building a lovely welcome to the Skeleton Coast (so called, at least in one version of the story, for its shipwrecks), so I gave them ten bucks.

They said they used seal bones for this, which given the number of dead
seals I pass on the Swakop beach, seems entirely likely.

We stopped at the beach in Hentie's Bay, and it was a revelation.  The strand - the sandy part - was about 10 meters or so below the street, with a pretty sharp drop from one level to the other.  I loved it.  I think we ate sandwiches there, or leftover pizza or something, Kit and I enjoying the brisk ocean breezes while Karen enjoyed the snug interior of the bakkie.

The drop-off is much steeper and more dramatic than it looks in this picture.
I am tidier when seen in person.  Okay.  Not really.

Much, much more driving, and we came to the Cape Cross Seal Colony.  Ever been to a seal, or sea lion, colony?  It's an olfactory experience par excellence.  You should definitely visit this one, but there's one just north of Santa Barbara, California, if that's more convenient for now.  These are called cape fur seals but are actually a species of sea lion.

Fuzzy baby!

Nursing baby!

A fairly small portion of the colony.  All the dark spots in the water are seals.

Have you read Doris Lessing's The Cleft?

Actually, I could not be surfeited with these guys.

Surfeited with surf and stink, we headed south again and turned inland, and the roads changed from the relatively smooth salt to the bumpier 'gravel' in local parlance.  And so it would go for much of the next week, and I believe worth every skeletal shake.