It's a Good Thing That we Brought our Own Fun

Guess we all know what the popular religion is in Namibian train station. Tom Cruise would be proud.
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Walvis bay looks like a nice neighborhood in Florida, or maybe the OC.  It's on a quiet beach with thousands of Flamengos, and is full of gorgeous mansions.  They're HUGE.  We're still not sure who lives in them because the town was kind of dead when we were there, but my best guess is that there's a lot of wealthy German retired people living there.

But, like I said, how we got there is half the fun.  The overnight train from Windhoek is a real adventure, partially because it's a combined passenger and freight train, stops for long stretches in the middle of the night, lurches hard enough to hurl you out of your seat, and seems to have no security.  At one point, when we just started, there were people jumping on the train 5 or 10 minutes after we started moving.  The seats were pretty comfortable, but we were definately the only tourists (or white people) for that matter.

It's like the OC transplanted to Namibia...sans the while girls with mobile phones and H2's.

This may be my favorite backpacking picture ever. This, in a picture, is what life is like out there.
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Our place in Walvis bay was definately not a normal hostel--it was more like Chalets that a family would rent.  It was nice housing, though.  That same day, since we were bored, we managed to schedule quadbiking out in the namibian dunes.  And that, my friends, was awesome.  You can check out the pictures, but they don't really show the scale of things.  We were bombing up and down some pretty massive dunes.

That night we were all exhausted, so we all just made a bbq, played some cards, and fell asleep early.  It was a long day.  We left the next morning in a taxi for the real party on the Namibian coast: Swakopmund.  Walvis bay was nice, but it's definately not a place where you can spend a whole lot of time.