Last year, Reid and I took our first trip to Namibia. Ah, travel pre-Covid. We liked it so much, we went again. I am so far behind in my posts, I just realized I never covered these trips. The first trip was to Windhoek and Sossusvlei and the second trip was to Swakopmund and the Skeleton Coast.
Sossusvlei is in the Namib desert, the oldest desert in the world. The landscape is incredible. Sossusvlei and Deadvlei are part of a petrified forest. You can climb the dunes and do hikes through the desert. The day we went it was already 96 degrees at 10am, so we skipped the climbing and hiking. We stayed in the moon landscape area and it looked exactly liked the moon. We had some amazing sunsets. The sky was always a crystal clear blue with almost no clouds.
Mountain Pass 
Moon Lodge 
Road to Sossuvlei 
Sossusvlei 
Big Daddy Dune 
Oryx in the shade 
Sossusvlei 
Ground squirrel
The trip to Swakopmund was a little weekend getaway to the beach. Africa doesn’t really do “beach towns” like the US and Europe. In fact, most beach areas have roads on the beach so it’s hard to find a place to go stay in a beach house. Swakopmund is one of those places. We decided to do a day trip up to the Skeleton Coast too. Wow. We came across shipwrecks, whale bones, sea salt pools, random windpumps, and even an abandoned oil rig. The sea salt areas were interesting in that there were miles and miles of stands selling the sea salt on the honor system. I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves.
Beach house view 
Swakopmund Beach 
Skeleton Coast Park Road 
We loved Namibia and we will be back!
The pictures do speak for themselves, they are amazing.
That first picture just takes my breath away– so peaceful and vast- and desolate.