Today I had two very different experiences – one wet and one dry. I woke early to make the 8am departure of a catamaran cruise to Halifax Island, home to a colony of African penguins. The port of Luderitz was quite busy – in addition to a small fishing industry, several giant diamond-mining ships operate there. The latter scrape the sea floor, sieve the mud, and harvest large quantities of high quality diamonds.

On the way to see the penguins we passed the port’s lighthouse and a few seals; dolphins also followed our boat but proved frustratingly hard to capture on film.

When we got to Halifax Island, we saw a large colony (about 1,000 pairs) of nesting penguins with the added bonus of a few flamingos. It was the first time I had seen penguins in the wild.

Most of the penguins nested in two large groups, standing on top of a large mound of guano from generations of birds. I thought this was not the most hygienic place to raise young.

One couple had instead chosen to nest in an abandoned house, which seemed a much more sensible place to me.

After my cruise, I went shopping in the town of Luderitz to buy food to cook that evening. After many evenings of steak, I wanted to find some fresh fish….but bizarrely the city had none, despite being a fishing port. I had to buy meat yet again, and settled back in my room and looked at the sea for a midday break. A seal and a dolphin came looking for fish in the sea right in front of my room – I hope they had more success than I did!

In the early afternoon, I set off for my second excursion of the day, to the abandoned diamond mining town of Kolmanskop. Diamonds were discovered by accident in the area in 1908, by a worker clearing sand from railway tracks. The find prompted a prospecting boom of which the town of Kolmanskop was initially the centre. The miners – mostly German colonists – systematically stripped and sieved the surface levels of sand, at their peak producing a million carats per year of diamonds (or about 12% of total global production). Many became rich in the process, though the native people who provided the manual labour got little or nothing for their efforts. The residents built a hospital, school, and even a casino.

There was a butcher, baker and ice factory, and fresh water was brought in by rail and stored in a big tank on the hill above the town.

It couldn’t last. In the late 1920s, the ground around Kolmanskop was almost depleted, and in 1928 another big diamond field was found in a different place. The town’s residents abandoned it, and by the 1950s it was deserted. The sand dunes that constantly move around the area – and which even today need constant clearing from the roads and the railway line – swept in to reclaim the town.

Today, Kolmanskop has become a tourist attraction. Most people visit on the guided tours in the morning, but I bought a special ticket allowing me to walk round in the afternoon, and I had the place completely to myself. A few buildings had been restored, but most had been allowed to slowly decay. The most atmospheric were those which were in the path of the shifting sand dunes. Sand would pile up on their outside walls and force an entry through doors or windows, piling up inside as a continuation of the marching dune.

I also liked some of the grandest houses, built for the town’s management – like the accountant’s, the architect’s or the quartermaster’s residences. These were built on slightly higher ground and had so far escaped the marching sand dunes.

Inside, ornate wallpaper peeled from their walls, and a strange silence reigned. I sat on the veranda of the accountant’s house in the late afternoon sun, reflecting on the transience of life and the futility of humanity’s attempts to defy nature.  

Previous post: Duwisib and its desert horses

Next Post: Off the beaten track in Namibia – Orange River and South African border