Canyon Roadhouse

We stayed two nights at the Gondwana Canyon Roadhouse . It's a fun place, decorated like an old "Route 66" style garage. Where they come up with this number of artifacts, I have no idea. It's almost like an old museum.

And it's located only 14 kms from the Fish River Canyon.

Well that was a different Christmas.

We haven't really updated you about our activities since we arrived at The Canyon Roadhouse on the 23rd. And then, we took a blog holiday yesterday! We figured that none of you were going to be on the internet anyhow (yeah, right!) being that it was Christmas Day and all...so we took a break too.

So we'll kind of squeeze two days worth of activities in this one post!

Kalahari Farmhouse

We recently spent two nights at the Gondwana Collection's Kalahari Farmhouse near Stampriet, Namibia. This place is a little different because the lodge and chalet rooms are situated on an actual working farm.

And you can even have a tour of the farm.

Rain turns the dirt roads to mud!

We had to do about 440 kms (275 miles) yesterday from the Kalahari Farmhouse to the Canyon Roadhouse. There's an easy paved road that goes that distance, but it wouldn't be like us to do it the easy way!

Actually it was more wanting to do it the exciting way instead of the boring way. And exciting it was...

Namib Desert Lodge

We recently spent three nights at the Gondwana Collection's Namib Desert Lodge. This is a larger resort, with 65 rooms. It's within a day trip of the popular desert dunes at Sossusvlei, and that's the main attraction for most people.

But, it's also a very scenic destination itself, and we enjoyed the three days we spent just exploring the area around the lodge.

From one desert to the next.

Yesterday we drove from the Namib Desert to the western edge of the Kalahari Desert. And we had to drive through the Naukluft Mountains to do it. A really pretty area, and we totally enjoyed that part of the drive.

And, we picked up another hitchhiker along the way!

Thunderstorm in the desert!

Here in the Namib Desert, it gets pretty hot at this time of year. And it's supposed to be the rainy season now, but after all, this is the desert. So we weren't counting on seeing too much of that! Either way, we wanted to do some hiking and they've got two trails here at the Namib Desert Lodge. And because it gets so hot, we hit the trail at 7:30am yesterday morning.

Before breakfast!

The Dune Star

We're currently staying at The Namib Desert Lodge. The lodge is located on the edge of a series of petrified sand dunes. Yes, sand that has sat and compressed for so long that it has turned to rock. The scenery here is so spectacular that Gondwana Collection has built a camp on top of one of these petrified dunes!

Yesterday, we went on a little sundowner safari to have a look at this new camp. The Dune Star Camp.

Yee-haw, what a drive!

We've done a lot of road trips. And so we've been on a lot of roads, and some of them have been a little hairy!

Well, we finally got ourselves onto a road in Namibia that was pretty interesting. As in very steep!

Damara Mopane Lodge

We stayed the  nights of December 15th and 16th at Gondwana Collection's Damara Mopane Lodge. This lodge is located about 425 kms (264 miles) north of the capital city of Windhoek so many people make it their first stop if they're heading towards either Etosha National Park or the Opuwo region.