April 30, 2024
116/137 Days; 21 days remaining
Walvis Bay, Namibia Departing at 18:00
Another beautiful day. Cool in the morning and warming up quickly. The various excursions today involved going odd roading in the desert, birding, a cruise and going to the beach. Nothing really appealed to us, so we have decided to simple stay on board and relax. It was decided we would go into town, the Dunes Mall anyway. There is a shuttle from the ship to the Dunes Mall and it takes fifteen minutes. We thought going into the Dunes Mall and having lunch would be a good opportunity to try some off ship food.
We’re going to take the 11:00 shuttle to the Dunes Mall. It will give us an opportunity to see a little more of the town and see how the locals shop. The mall opened 2017. It is nearly 300,000 square feet (27,000 m²). It is a single level mall situated on the main road between the airport and the central business district. Basically, it could be any mall in America, or else where for that fact. Anchors of the mall are Pick n Pay, Clicks, Woolworths, Dischem, Game & Checkers.
Many of the smaller shops carry clothing and things you would find in any mall. The electronic store was interesting. Somethings, like refrigerators, start out smaller than we see in the US but go all the way up to double French door models with water and ice dispensers. The cost isn’t much different than we would see in California. Other, more normal, household items, like irons, panini makers, waffle irons and smaller items are very reasonable priced. Yes, they had 42” TV’s, routers, and computers of varying sizes.
We checked out the eight different places to eat and settled on Debonairs Pizza. The pizza on the Mariner is ok but not great. Debonairs does some interesting things with pizza. Like Dominos, they like to stuff the outer edge but unlike Donminos not with cheese. It looks like the stuff it with a chicken sausage. A lot of extra protein for you, if you need it.
They also made this into a “triple decker”. That is, a pizza crust, with sauce and meat, then another pizza crust, again topped with sauce and meet, this is then topped with another pizza which it topped with cheese. You can get it stuffed or not. A large triple decker delight was NS179.90. Oh, that is all of $10US.
We took a little precaution and ordered a medium Hawaiian; ham and cheese. The pizza and two 16oz, cokes cost us all of $7US. The staff was nicely dressed, had hairnets, and wore gloves. One might assume that anything that goes into a 700 F degrees (375 C) oven should be fine. The medium pizza was slightly larger than a dinner plate, but more than adequate for the two of us. It tasted fine.
Afterwards we walked out to the very large parking lot and waited for the shuttle. It wasn’t all that hot outside here near the ocean. That is probably the reason the the town doesn’t extend very far inland.
Back on the ship we rested and got ready for dinner at Prime 7. There are now only 446 passengers, out of 700, on the ship so getting reservations at one of specialty restaurants isn’t at all difficult. We went to dinner at 19:00. The dinning room was virtually empty. Usually, you are limited to only a few nights in the specialty restaurants but with so few passengers you get more access. There are now more crew, 500, on board than passengers, hopefully a strange occurrence.
Dinner was exceptional, except there was probably a little too much “service” being provided. After dinner Maria returned to the suite to listen to her book club book and I went to the Connoisseur lounge for a cigar and port.
We did leave out visiting the coast flats yesterday, on the way back to the ship, to see the flamingos. It is one of the sights of Namibia. There were hundred of pink and a few white flamingos. Makes one think of Florida. These however were real not plastic. Beautiful birds.
Buonanotte e Ciao, Enrico e Maria
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