We woke up later this morning than we have done for the last few days, not setting an alarm we were up by 10:00am. As it was a Sunday, it turned out that almost everything was closed, but we managed to buy ingredients for a little picnic of sandwiches, drinks and some snacks at the local supermarket. Setting off for Agate beach, we drove on one of only three publicly accessible roads out of Lüderitz, but five metres on each side of the road was restricted land. We stopped along the way to game watch at a beautiful fresh water spot filled with flamingos, springbok, gemsbok and many other species of birds. The beach was very interesting, there were many braais dotted around the car park area and there wasn't any sand along the entire beachfront, instead it was made of millions of Agate stones, hence the name. A very odd site in a desert full of sand!
Directly in front of us, a few kilometres out to sea was a massive diamond ship, part of the Namibian Minerals Corporation that suctions diamonds from between 10-20m below the seabed and gathers approximately 650,000 carats per year! The weather was gorgeous on the beach, albeit slightly windy. I had a fantastic time trying to find clear stones that could be diamonds, and gathered a small handful that I will continue to believe, however unlikely that might be, are my tiny stash of uncut diamonds :)
We left the beach after lunch and drove along the permissible route to Diaz point, another tourist spot about 20kms away. There were many more flamingos along the route, a very beautiful and stark contrast to the sandy background. The desert scenery was so stunning, and made Dan and I angry that so much of this area is completely inaccessible to almost everyone in the world. We arrived at a deserted Diaz point, but we weren't sure if it was always this quiet or if that was a consequence of it being Sunday. The coffee shop was open however and a very old and slightly weird lady greeted us and mumbled something incoherent that we assumed had to be about ordering drinks, so we asked for tea and coffee which she got up to go get for us.
The wind at the point was slightly chilly, so instead of taking a seat at one of the tables that were all in the shade, we settled on the floor in the courtyard to soak up the sun and talk to the Doberman and Jack Russell who were enjoying the rays. When our tea and coffee were ready, we asked if we would be allowed to enjoy it on the floor where we were already sitting, and the old woman was very happy to oblige! The dogs were really sweet and the lady told us all about Diaz point, most of which we didn't understand but she was really sweet so we smiled and nodded along anyway. I found a little trampoline obviously there for small children to play on, so obviously I started jumping on it too! The "weather rock" they had set up was hilarious, with a sign under it saying "if the rock is wet, it's raining" and "if the rock is moving, it's windy" etc.
We set off for the last "tourist" spot listed on the map we took from our room, a ship wreckage 10kms away along the coast line. The drive was gorgeous and the dirt road was in great shape but I was still really happy to be in our Landy in what felt like the middle of nowhere! There were a few families on the ship wreckage beach enjoying lunch, and we didn't hang around for very long as it was getting really, really windy and the wreckage was now only a small rusted shell that has been mostly swallowed up by the sand. We had a beautiful drive through the dunes back to Lüderitz. We drove around the town when we got back to explore the parts we hadn't yet seen. We found our way up a hill near the B&B to a beautiful church lurched on the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean. The guard outside was happy to let us in, and it was worth the exploring as the stained glass work inside was gorgeous with the sun shining directly through the side windows and casting stunning colourful shadows on the floor.
Back at the B&B, our afternoon turned into a Walking Dead vs the limited internet battle. When we got home we used some of our internet to load an episode of the Walking Dead, but right near the end it stopped buffering as we had run out of data. We hopped in the car to the petrol station which sold cards with preloaded data and went home to watch more of the Walking Dead. What we didn't realise is that we could have bought a more cost effective "data bundle", which we ended up going back for as we ran out of our latest R50 of data pretty quickly. We reloaded the same episode of the walking dead we were on and as I went to skip ahead to where we were before it reloaded the entire episode and had chewed up all of our data!!! SO frustrating! We decided we had had enough of buying data and driving around so we snuggled down in bed and watched some TV for the rest of the afternoon. I was glad to not be outside in the fierce wind, which can be extremely painful because of the sand, especially as we had both managed to get a little sunburnt from our days adventures.
Dinner was a fantastic affair as we were their only guests of the evening, so we all sat together at a larger table with a view of the kitchen and shared all the pizza together, as well as a bottle of wine and beers! He made a chicken, feta, mushroom and onion pizza, a salami, pepper and olive pizza and an Indian spiced chicken pizza, which were all amazingly delicious. We left some of the pizza because he was also making two large dessert pizzas to share, the same banana and almond one that I already loved, but he also made a new one that was equally delicious that had plums on it! We spent a fantastic evening getting to know our German hosts, and enjoying their fantastic hospitality and amazing pizzas. Despite their objections Dan paid for our dinner and they sent us on our way with many smiles and waves and the leftover pizza for our drive tomorrow, out of Lüderitz and Namibia, all the way to Springbok, South Africa!
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