Ever since arriving in Namibia I’ve seen people proudly sporting their “Sandboarding, Swakopmund” t-shirts, so I thought that we should give it a go. After our disappointing windless land-yachting experience, I was pretty confident that we’d have more luck falling down a dune on a stretched tea-tray.

Chatting to past participants it appeared that the struggle was not so much about the coming down, but rather in getting to the top of the dune in the first place. In fact, in a four hour sandboarding session, the average person managed only three 15-30 second runs down the sandy slopes because walking up the dune took up so much time and energy. From my experience of walking up Dune 45 at Sossusvlei, I knew that having to walk up the dunes prior to getting on the board would completely kill the experience for me. Rather than miss-out on altogether, we set about finding a man with a number of sandboards and, importantly, a quad bike. Unbelievably, in Swakopmund there was only one man who would deliver me to the top of the slopes without me using any personal effort and I print his details here in the hope that fellow Googling travellers come across this page and use him too. I was really pleased with the experience that Wayne at DuneSeven.com provided to us and would not hesitate to recommend him — he’s a bloody nice bloke and, as I’ve already mentioned, he’s the only one with a quad bike to save you struggling to the top of the dune on foot each time you want to board down it!

We’ve got some brilliant videos to show you also, but I still cannot upload to Youtube from Africa. Once I get the bandwidth (probably in the UAE) then I’ll let you know. Obviously, in the photo gallery below, I’ve picked the best shots of me standing-up (there was only one) and the of Squifter eating sand. On the forthcoming video, Squifter’s falls are even funnier! I’ve got a video of nearly running over 20 Africans who, unbeknown to me, decided to climb the slope of the dune as I was coming down; the look on both my and their faces is priceless.

Claire adds: Of course, I only fell because I got up soome speed. I had to edit Dave’s video as he took 4 minutes to come down the slopes ;o)

[Show as slideshow]