We woke up at 8:00am this morning to make sure we had enough time to get ready and make it to Kolmanskop for the tour at 9:30am. Kolmanskop is a ghost town in the Namib desert in southern Namibia, a few kilometres inland from Lüderitz. It was named after a transport driver named Johnny Coleman who, during a sand storm, abandoned his ox wagon on a small incline opposite the settlement. In 1908 the worker Zacharias Lewala found a diamond while working in this area and showed it to his supervisor. After realizing that this area was rich in diamonds, lots of German miners settled in this area and soon after the German government declared a large area as a "Sperrgebiet", starting to exploit the diamond field.
Driven by the enormous wealth of the first diamond miners, the residents built the village in the architectural style of a German town, with amenities and institutions including a hospital, ballroom, power station, school, skittle-alley, theater and sport-hall, casino, ice factory and the first x-ray-station in the southern hemisphere,as well as the first tram in Africa. It had a railway link to Lüderitz.The town declined after World War I when the diamond-field slowly exhausted and was ultimately abandoned in 1954. Due to its location within the restricted area of the Namib desert, tourists need a permit to enter the town.
We arrived just after 9:00am and paid our fee to the guard at the gate and received two day passes. On the same road to the entrance to Kolmanskop is the security station for the miners at Elizabeth town, another abandoned mining town about 60kms away where they have recently dug a new mine. A large white building that straddles the road is where all of the cars and people into and out of that section of the spergebiet are X-rayed and searched for any concealed diamonds. We drove up into the Main Street of Kolmanskop and entered the main building which houses the coffee room, the museum, the ball room and the bowling alley.
The tour only started at 9:30am, so we sat down for some drinks. While Dan was enjoying his coffee I went next door into the small Museum. In the museum I learned the fascinating tale of Fairytale Valley. The valley was discovered by a worker and his employer who are on their way back to Kolmanskop after scouting the diamonds. They realised that the area had chosen to set up camp was literally shimmering with diamonds in the firelight, they could pick them up by the spadeful. I would have loved that, I'm fascinated by diamonds, what girl isn't ;)
At 9:30am we lined up outside the entrance to the Ball room and were invited in by a lovely young guy who clearly knew his stuff. He explained that the Ball room used to be filled almost every weekend with some extravagant party and usually they had a pianist, at which point he walked over to the piano that was still in the corner and began playing and singing for us! We next went to the kitchen which still has the vintage stoves, sinks and most of the appliances. We were taken to the local shop that sold all of the grocers and toiletries to the towns people, usually brought in by boat from South Africa! One lady who shopped there was so rich in fact that she used to pay for her items in diamonds. A fascinating building we were shown around was the ice factory where fresh water had to be shipped in specifically to make ice and each of the houses in town would get a block each day to cool their fridge. That block would also be part of their rationed water for the day as fresh water was obviously scarce in the desert.
There were many different places to look around once our official tour had ended, one of our favourites being the managers house which had been dug completely out of the sand that had once engulfed it, and had also been renovated back to its former glory and was a beautiful building. We wandered around at our own slow pace and explored parts of buildings we probably shouldn't have gone into but they provided such amazing photographs it was importable to resist. I'm absolutely fascinated with the decay that time, wind and sand have caused to these buildings, and imagining what they may once have looked like. The views from the houses over the sand dunes were simply stunning, but did highlight how very isolated Kolmaskop is from literally anything else!
Just as we were exploring one of our last houses Dan was out on the top floor porch and was shouted to by a security guard that it was time to leave, so he obviously didn't allow me to step out onto the porch but shepherded me straight out of the house. He really doesn't like to break rules! We left just after 1pm and drew money on our way back to the B&B. As we were having such a great time in Lüderitz, Dan went upstairs to tell our host that we would be staying an extra day, and also asked her to book a table for us at our Pizzeria that evening. The afternoon became super windy so we used some of our internet allotment and watched two episodes of The Walking Dead.
We drove over to the Pizzeria for 7pm, and Dan ordered a Regina pizza with ham and mushrooms and I ordered a Hawaiian. We also ordered a bottle of red wine to share and Dan ordered a beer to start. After the delicious pizzas that we totally annihilated, we ordered another banana, honey and almond dessert pizza and by this point we were the only people remaining in the restaurant so Betha and her husband came over and joined us! We spent ages chatting to them and learned that they retired from their jobs in Germany and purchased a vintage 45foot sailboat and had an amazing adventure sailing it down the coast of Africa before settling in Lüderitz. They used to live on a farm in Namibia when they were much younger, and knew that once they had retired that they wanted to come back and live here, but what an amazing way to get here! They took months to make the trip and brought their two German shepherds along on the journey. After an amazing evening with fabulous company and delicious food we bid them farewell and promised to be back again tomorrow!
