It's six AM and we are slowly making our way into port, backwards, which means our little slice of heaven suite is looking directly at a landscape that could be of a port anywhere on the coast of Europe. You have blue water, fishing boats gentley bobbing, a town of sturdily built houses rising out of the water, climbing the hillside to the solidy built church near the summit. You look left and you see more tidy houses stretching off into the distance and to the right a port facility that is clean, modern and seems efficient. Yet, when you peer though the binoculars you see this tiny town is truly an outpost surrounded by a sea of rock and sand.
Welcome to Luderitz, Namibia. After two days of being tossed around by heavy seas, we arrived at this little port to visit it's one main attraction, a ghost town called Kolmannskuppe. Luderitz itself is about 20,000 in population and was first visited by the Portuguese explorer Diaz in 1487, but situated on the edge of the Namib Desert, along a treachous rocky coast, there was very little interest in settling the area. Finally in 1884, the town's namesake, Franz Luderitz, bought the port and the surrounding land from a Namib Chief for 2500 German Marks, 200 guns and some toy soldiers. The Chief thought he was getting a great deal because what he was selling was just sand and rock.
Unfortunately for the Chef, who kept on selling vast tracks of land to Luderitz, diamonds were discovered in 1903 and the rush began. Diamonds were so plentiful they were literally just picked up out of the sand. One method of collecting them was to form a line sixty men across and have them crawl across the desert picking up diamonds as they moved forward.
Namibia is the world's largest diamond producer and while today most of the diamonds are mined from the ocean floor by vacuuming up the sand, a huge part of Namibia is off limits to everyone except the diamond workers because so many small diamonds can still be picked out of the sand.
Kolmannskuppe was begun in 1913 and continued in operation until 1956 when it was abandoned as diamond production moved south and onto the ocean floor. Left intact for the desert to reclaim, it is now the major (only) tourist attraction in Luderitz.
As we began our tour the guide warned us to be on the lookout for poisonous snakes: no rattlers, just vipers, puff adders, side-winders. The kind that don't make noise before they bite. Yikes!
You have to hand it to the people that built this town (in the middle of nowhere in the middle of really nowhere) in the early 1900's. The buildings are of an impressive scale and the modern conveniences, every building had electricity, ice and fresh water were delivered daily, the hospital had the first two x-ray machines on the continent, and the sausages were made fresh daily, were impressive for the time.
The only part of the town that has been restored is the central meeting hall. It contained the kitchen, gymnasium, concert hall, eating areas and most importantly the bar and bowling alley.
The rest of the town is being slowly reclaimed by the desert.
That's it. A small town on a small bay and a ghost town. Everything was clean, orderly and well scrubbed. No teaming masses, impromptu markets on the side of the road, shanty towns, graffiti, or traffic chaos we have found all over Africa. What would our next stop bring as we traveled to the larger port city of Walvis Bay and the resort town of Swakopmund?
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