91 Windhoek - Sossusvlei
March 11th 2011
Winhoek Eros Airport is a nice place, and the Safari Court Hotel is just a 5 minute walk from the terminal.
In the morning I returned to the airport to check about the installation of the new battery, and while it was done, I got my Brompton bicycle out and went for ride to downtown. Seems like a cool place and pretty relaxed for a capital.
In the afternoon everything was ready, and I could again start the plane without assistance. Westairs Peter Keil had helped me file a flight plan, as it is compulsory for a foreign registered plane in Namibia.
I was soon on my way to Sossusvlei in the Namib Dessert. My destination was the Sossusvlei Lodge, that has an airstrip 5 minutes from the hotel. The airfield is run by Safari Air, and because I had called in advance of my expected arrival time, Roland, a pilot with Safari Air, pulled up just after my landing, and took me to the lodge.
It is kind of strange to fly into an empty looking dessert, only having the coordinates to go by to find my destination. For a short time, I was actually not sure if I had made a mistake entering the coordinates in the GPS, but the airstrip became visible a few miles out. Just were it was supposed to be.
Landing at the strip, I realized one of the downsides with the Synthetic Vision: it kept giving me warnings about ground proximity on the landing. The airstrip is obviously not one of the airports coded into the system.
I had the same warnings yesterday. But that was because I flew a short distance over the fish River Canyon very low over the water! Didn't catch any fish though!
