“Welcome to our playground,” Nico said as we pulled up to the beach of Swakopmund in our run-down taxivan with Swakop Sandboarding stenciled in black along the yellow stripe on its side. At their base, the dunes just made my quads burn and feet sting. Why did you wear sandals? It’s like stepping on a stove. We are in the des-ERT! But after trekking up (and learning the hard way that if you don’t go up diagonal, you don’t go up at all), it looked like God had decided to frost an endless caramel cake along the navy blue ocean.

Now, the one thing I am missing about San Francisco is ski season. But sub snow for sand, my 80s ski suit for shorts, goggles for sunglasses, and my helmet for…well, an even goofier helmet, and make that a “was.” 

Strapped into my snowboard, which I had massaged with a palm-full of pink potpourri flavored Cobra Furniture Polish, I had the sea on my left an endless dune-scape to my right. Tahoe who?

The penultimate run was called Cool Runnings. “For reasons you will find out later,” Nico had promised. As I peered over the lip of the dune, he prepped me a bit. “We don’t go see therapists. We don’t use doctors. This is our doctor.” And then a push. I was barreling down, smile full of sand, laughing at the absurdity of the scene I was (literally) swallowing. And then the fun part. With a freshly exfoliated face, it was time to go back up.

After a tomato and cheese sandwich washed down with a tin cup full of Windhoek Lager, we got back into Becky (our heartthrob of a truck) and headed back to Windhoek. When we were stopped by the police officer on our way out of town, I got flustered, insisting that we were “just, you know, driving back to WIND-hook.” It’s Vind-tho-ek. Just when I think I’m getting the hang of it, my true colors come out. A glaring red, white, and blue.