The Flamingo Lodge

The Flamingo Lodge was our final destination in Namibe. The place where we were staying. When I say Namibe I'm referring to the area, not the city. The city of Namibe was about 70km away in a straight line.
The lodge belongs to a South African guy and is maintained by a young couple of biologists that live there and tend the place while they do their research.
To get there we left the city of Namibe and drove 70km on the beach (literaly on the beach).


(our car on the beach - we had to take air out of the tires so it wouldn't sink in the sand. The guy on the picture was Chico, our cook / bush guide / fix all guy)

It is imposible to get there if you don't have a 4x4. Even if you take the "more normal road" you still have 40km of riverbed to get through, and the total distance is about 90km instead of 70km.


(welcome to Flamingo Lodge! - yes, those are whale bones!)

The place is very very neat and well taken care of. It sits on the beach and is surrounded by mountains and cliffs. You're now in the middle of the Namibe desert, a couple of kms north of the skeleton coast.
You have the main building with the bar and restaurant on top of a hill, and on the beach you have the guest houses (or should I say huts).


(the beach accommodation)

Every house has two or more beds, and a private bath with hot water (a luxury in a place like this!). Our hut had already an occupant when we got there. A bat. We were disturbing the poor creature that lived there all year round. This ended up being very useful because of the roaches. Bats eat cockroaches.
The problem with roaches is (maybe it's an urban legend) they love crawling into tight spaces.
A friend of ours told us a story that happened to him in a trip to Indonesia where a friend of his had a roach stuck in his ear for a week before the local doctors found out and were able to pry it out.
We always slept with ear plugs...


(the view from our bedroom was incredible)

We were there during winter time so it was a bit cold / windy to hit the water but I imagine that during summer time this is a wonderful place to be if you want a beach holiday in an exotic country!
Even not being good for a day at the beach, you never get bored for there are too many things to do around here. Just ask the lodge keepers, they will tell you which activities you can do.
We even went fishing (we caught nothing, but it was fun!).
Check out the ride for the fishing expedition:


(can you guess what happened to this poor car? They rolled it over. No one got hurt fortunately. As it was totally wrecked they just chopped off the ceiling, included one wood board on each side of the car - to keep it from folding in two - and there you have a fishing car!)