Day 9: Along the Skeleton Coast

Feast your senses on more incredible sands and seas... an optional early hot air balloon flight offers a bird’s-eye view of the dunes. Then fly over what Portuguese sailors called As Areias do Inferno (The Sands of Hell). We know it as the Skeleton Coast... an endless, forbidding stretch of beach that for centuries has been a graveyard for ships like the Eduard Bohlen; it ran aground in 1909 but now lies buried in dunes a half-mile inland! Wave to thousands of seals en route to Swakopmund – a 19th-century German colonial outpost-turned-resort that many call “more German than Germany.” Check out the village... have a traditional lunch... and relax at a luxury hotel that’s hosted celebrities as diverse as Eartha Kitt and Aristotle Onassis.