We did a couple more running repairs to the car:-
Fitted foam rubber to all doors to try and keep the dust out:
Put duck-tape (marvellous stuff) over holes in the floor where things had been bolted through before,
then left Swakopmund.
Quite a nice coastal town with, like many places in Namibia, a German influence.
Cold in the evenings and the mist leaves everything covered in a salty-dew.
If you’ve ever been sailing for 3-4 days continuously you’ll know how nice that is.
Swakop is mainly set up for ‘adventure’ tourists – dune-boarding; sky-diving; quad biking; etc but it’s nice enough and with a couple of good cafes & bars (Village Cafe was our favourite).
Also some good craft shops and interesting street artists.

This is Zin Maisiri who makes political commentary pictures out of newspaper and rubbish he finds.
Some really simple, but nice, work.

We headed north east for Spitzkoppe, on the edge of the Namib Naukluft desert.
A small group of isolated granite and conglomerate inselbergs set up as a Conservation Area with supposedly some really beautiful, remote camping.

We weren’t disappointed.
Some beautiful rock formations, including wind-sculpted boulders…

…and ancient river-carved rock arches.

In the whole mountain range there are only 10 camping sites available.
Each is from 10 to 30 acres.
This was the first one we booked (Camp 1)…

‘Some Fantastic Place’ – one of my favourite songs by Squeeze, and now one of my favourite places in Namibia.

We pitched camp, grabbed a glass of wine and just sat and stared all evening.
This is the view from The Penthouse.

There’s not much in the way of wildlife around, but if you click on (or look carefully at) the picture above you can see an elephant lying down on a rocky outcrop – with it’s trunk over the edge trying to get water out of a dry pool.

If you haven’t spotted it yet…

…here’s a close up…

…the passing safari truck (one of only 3 vehicles we saw) gives some idea of scale…

Sunset arrived around 7.30pm and turned an already lovely landscape into a beautiful one.

For some reason I woke really early the next morning.
Sunrise was around 5.50am.
I’m glad I did’t miss it.
Perhaps even more beautiful than the sunset.

And like a spotlight it illuminated what we’ve christened ‘Elephant Rock’.

Other than a single Rock Dassie and a couple of Ground Squirrels the only other life we saw were some extraordinary lizards.

Although we wanted to stay, we also wanted to see more of the mountains so switched camp to another spot known as Camp 10.
Equally beautiful.

Here we spent most of the day watching numerous Rock Dassies playing and feeding on the mountain slopes.

They’re quite big (between 4-9kg in weight) and although they look like large Guinea Pigs they’re actually quite closely related to the Elephant family (!)

They spent most of the day running between all the boulders and cracks on the rock faces, chattering and grunting calls to each other.
People say they are almost entirely ground-dwelling.
It’s not that they can’t climb trees…
… it’s just that they’re not very good at it.

The only thing that really distracts them from their eating and playing are these guys…

…which cause them to scatter like a handful of beads dropped on a stone floor.

As evening draws on though, they seem less fearful and come out in force to bask in the warmth of the sunset.

What a great few days we spent at Spitzkoppe.
We saw only 3 vehicles the whole time – one of them an American couple at one of the remote camps who had broken down with a flat battery. Fortunately we were able to get them started.

We were very sad to leave Spitzkoppe…’Some Fantastic Place‘.