Namibia’s Sea Life Proves There’s More Here Than Desert

Days 109-110, 2024 Grand World Voyage

Sunday and Monday, April 21-22, 2024; Lüderitz and Walvis Bay, Namibia

This is when, with just three weeks remaining on our 18-week cruise, time starts to speed up. I find myself fighting against the urge to start packing. After all, the three weeks are longer than the vast majority of cruises.

Turning north along Africa’s Atlantic coast, we have arrived at the same two Namibian ports we visited last year.

Namibia won its independence just more than 30 years ago, having been colonized in the late 1880s by Germany. After World War I it was put under the administration of South Africa. Yesterday’s port of Lüderitz still has a strong German flavor. Last year I visited the fascinating town of Kolmanskop, which thrived after the discovery of diamonds and then was abandoned in the mid 20^th Century, leaving it to the encroaching desert sands.

This year my sisters and I took to the water on a catamaran tour to Halifax Island to see African penguins. I developed a soft spot for the majestic Emperor Penguins after seeing the remarkable March of the Penguins documentary movie. At just about two feet tall, African penguins might not be so striking as their larger counterparts, but they are relatively easily seen in the wild in South Africa and Namibia. Due to their donkey-like sounds, they also are known as jackass penguins.

A century ago, the small island was prized for its penguin guano, as much as 125 feet deep and prized as fertilizer. Unfortunately, guano mining led to the decimation of the penguin population, once as high as 100,000 and now estimated at about 2,000.

Our guide said the island is the only place on earth where you can capture penguins and flamingos in the same photograph. I didn’t achieve that feat, as I was using my 1200mm zoom lens, but I did get a fleeting shot of a Greater flamingo in flight.

The camera struggled to focus on the penguins and not the rocks around them. To be honest, my iPhone 15 Max Pro did a better job, as seen by the gull I captured when trying for a shot of a frolicking Heaviside dolphin. I learned shooting from solid land makes for better photographs. We also saw large colonies of Cape cormorants and a few brown fur seals.

While our fellow cruisers who went to Kolmanskop complained of the heat, we found it to be downright cold on the deck of the catamaran in the stiff ocean breeze. Eloise and Elaine braved the cold in their windbreakers. It pays to plan for any weather conditions.

It being Sunday, most of the shops in town were closed by the time we returned to the pier. Some local schoolgirls were glad to share their dancing. We heard that more cruise ships than expected this late in the season have stopped here, due to rerouting to avoid the Red Sea.

Today’s port of Walvis Bay is larger, serving as the main port for not only Namibia’s capital of Windhoek, but also for the whole of this part of Africa. Last year our all-day tour took us to the famous dunes that meet the ocean and into the Namib desert with its Welwitschia plant that lives for hundreds of years with just two leaves.

I never dreamed I would be back so soon, so today I was lazy and just briefly left the ship to see the clustering jellyfish off the pier. I’m trying to put together a series of 10 back-to-back cruises for the summer and fall of 2025, and the quiet of the ship drew me into the planning.

In reality, some of the ship wasn’t quiet at all. A few dozen children from the Bernhard Nordkamp Centre joined us after making the 250-mile journey from Windhoek. Due to a connection with some passengers on a Holland America world cruise 15 years ago, choir students came to perform on the ship in Walvis Bay, and the connection was reestablished a couple of years ago. We enjoyed their program last year and raised $10,000 for the center. This year we doubled our contribution after holding a silent auction on board earlier in the cruise.