Tolin's 2024 World Cruise blog posts, Day 95, Apr 13, 2024, Walvis Bay, Namibia, Naukluft Park

Due to strong winds in Cape Town resulting in a 30-hour delayed departure, we had to bypass Luderitz

Our port call in Walvis Bay was modified and shortened

Walvis Bay is a city in Namibia and the name of the bay on which it lies. It is the second largest city in Namibia and the largest coastal city in the country. The city covers an area of 11 square miles of land. The bay is a safe haven for sea vessels because of its natural deep-water harbor, protected by the Pelican Point sand spit, being the only natural harbor of any size along the country's coast. Being rich in plankton and marine life, these waters also draw large numbers of southern right whales, attracting whalers and fishing vessels.

A succession of colonists developed the location and resources of this strategic harbor settlement. The harbor's value in relation to the sea route around the Cape of Good Hope had caught the attention of world powers since it was discovered by the outside world in 1485. The importance of the harbor, combined with its extreme isolation by land, explains the complicated political history of the town. For much of its history, Walvis Bay was governed as an exclave separate from the rest of the territory that today is Namibia.

The town is situated just north of the Tropic of Capricorn in the Kuiseb River delta and lies at the end of the TransNamib Railway to Windhoek, and on B2 road.

Walvis Bay, with its large bay and sand dunes, is an important center of tourism activity in Namibia. Attractions include the artificial Bird Island, center of a guano collection industry, the Dune 7 sand dune, the salt works, the abundant birdlife, and a museum. Kuisebmund Stadium, home to two clubs in the Namibia Premier League, is also located in the city. The beach resort of Langstrand lies just a few kilometers north. The Walvis Bay Export Processing Zone is an important facet of the local economy.

More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walvis_Bay

Rescue boat

Conveyers to load coal onto cargo ships

Coal heaps for loading in background

Self-propelled fuel barge/ship; we took on gallons in prep for our seven sea days.

We arrived in port at 3 PM, cleared immigrations, and were bussed to the Naukluft Park.

The Namib-Naukluft Park is a national park in western Namibia, situated between the coast of the Atlantic Ocean and the edge of the Great Escarpment. It encompasses part of the Namib Desert (considered the world's oldest desert), the Naukluft mountain range, and the lagoon at Sandwich Harbor. The best-known area of the park and one of the main visitor attractions in Namibia is Sossusvlei, a clay pan surrounded by dunes, and Sesriem, a small canyon of the Tsauchab. The desert research station of Gobabeb is situated within the park.

With an overall area of 19,216 square miles, the Namib-Naukluft National Park was at the time of its last expansion the largest game park in Africa and the fourth largest in the world. It consists of a strip of land on the Atlantic Ocean, including 1,000 miles of sea, that extends roughly 370 miles north-to-south from the Swakop River to the B4 road to Lüderitz.

Ancient dunes near Sossusvlei, in the relatively frequently visited center of the national park, accessible by road from Sesriem.

A surprising collection of creatures survives in the hyper-arid region, including snakes, geckos, unusual insects, hyenas, gemsboks, springboks, leopards, African wildcats, cape foxes, baboons, caracals, bat-eared foxes, and jackals.

The region is characterized by high, isolated inselbergs and kopjes (the Afrikaans term for rocky outcrops), made up of dramatic blood-red granites, rich in feldspars and sandstone. The easternmost part of the park covers the Naukluft Mountains.

More moisture comes in as a fog off the Atlantic Ocean than falls as rain, with the average of 106 millimeters of rainfall per year concentrated in February and April.

The winds that bring in the fog are also responsible for creating the park's towering sand dunes, whose burnt orange color is a sign of their age. The orange color develops over time as iron in the sand is oxidized, like rusty metal; the older the dune, the brighter the color.

These dunes are the tallest in the world, in places rising almost 1000 feet above the desert floor. The dunes taper off near the coast, and lagoons, wetlands, and mudflats located along the shore attract hundreds of thousands of birds.

'Namib' means "open space," and the Namib Desert gave its name to form Namibia – "land of open spaces."

The park was established in 1907 when the German Colonial Administration proclaimed three game reserves in German South West Africa. Today's Namib-Naukluft park was proclaimed as "Game Reserve No. 3." The other two were the Omuramba Omatako and Etosha. The northern border of the reserve was three miles south of the Swakop River, and the southern border was six miles south of the Kuiseb River, so that the park included the Kuiseb but excluded the Swakop due to the economic activities at its banks. After World War I the South African administration of South West Africa confirmed the proclamation of the Germans. For the Namib-Naukluft Park, the area of Sandwich Harbor was added in 1941, and a small extension of the southern border followed in 1962.

In 1966 "Game Reserve No. 3" was de-proclaimed, and the Namib Desert Park was established in its stead. The Namib Desert Park included a small area north of the Swakop River where Welwitschia grow, as well as the Moon Landscape east of Swakopmund. In 1979 two more large areas were added. The Naukluft Mountain Zebra Park was included so that the Naukluft Mountains now formed part of the protected area. It previously comprised 14 commercial farms that were bought by the government to protect the Hartmann mountain zebra. The second area added was a 1,000-mile strip of the Atlantic Ocean, making the Namib-Naukluft Park Namibia's first marine reserve.

The park's present boundaries were established in 1986 when the government was given control over parts of the Sperrgebiet, an area restricted for diamond mining. This vast strip of land has remained inaccessible to the general population but is now part of the Namib-Naukluft Park.

More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namib-Naukluft_National_Park