Swakopmund

Swakopmund was... Interesting, and bewildering. The city was definitely more focused on tourists than Walvis Bay was, despite only being 45min apart from each other. Swakopmund had a turbulent past during the German colonization, and there were obvious traces of it all around.

There were many houses built in German-seeming architectural styles, and with German names plastered on the front. "Gemeindehaus", "Pension am Bahnhof", "Villa am Strand", etc. But it all seemed off. The ultra-wide streets were often badly maintained, there were elegant promenades that had a luxurious conference center on one end and then ended suddenly in the middle of nowhere.

We had an extensive walk around the city on a Sunday afternoon, and it seemed that the city was quite empty - similar to German cities where Sundays are the days where nothing is happening. I read somewhere that around 13% of the city's inhabitants still spoke German as their first language. And we did hear German spoken at quite a few corners of the city. It just all seemed quite odd.

We had booked a campsite 14km outside of town, with a camping spot right at the beachfront. But before going there we had to stop at a gas station to fill up the tank again. In many African countries there are gas station attendants filling up the car, and they usually always offer to clean the windshield while the tank is filling up. This time, things were no different. Until they knocked on the drivers side door and made me aware that we had a flat tire!

The first thing we did was test the air pressure in all of the tires. The flat one had a remaining pressure of 1.4bar. Another one had barely 1.8bar. Two tires were alright. Suddenly it clicked for me. The reason we hadn't gotten stuck in the deep sand earlier today was because we had received a flat-ish tire on the desert gravel road! Of course, driving with a flat tire is not a good idea. Fortunately, the helpful attendants immediately offered to patch up the tire.

All I knew was that we had booked tire and windshield insurance with our rental van, so before agreeing to anything with the attendants I called the agency to ask about the correct procedure. They said if it is fixable they should fix it, I keep the receipt, and they reimburse me. The guys had already completed the preparations, and were just about to widen the hole so they could insert the filler to patch it up. I asked them for a receipt, and they said it was not possible to issue a receipt as it was something they were doing on the side for some extra income.

They quoted around 11€ for labor and materials to patch up the tire, and both Anne and I decided it was an acceptable loss to not be able to claim that back from the insurance. After some 15min patching time one of the tires was patched up and the other one with reduced pressure was determined to not be leaky but incorrectly filled.

Arriving at the campsite we found out that it was the most expensive, and most luxurious campsite we had visited so far. We had our our private building that housed a bathroom, a toilet, and a kitchen including fridge. We enjoyed the leftover pizza while watching the sun sink below the horizon, and made some calls to our respective families that evening.

Unfortunately, upon returning to our campsite, we learned that the electricity is shut off from 21:30 to 07:30. This was hugely inconvenient as we had the habit to charge all of our devices overnight, and would have to start into the workweek on empty batteries. But we were sure we could resolve the situation in the morrow.Read more