Swakopmund, Namibia

Swakopmund is the Atlantic coast's only proper town and one of the strangest small cities anywhere — a Wilhelmine-Lutheran spa town with Bavarian half-timbered hotels and a working German brewery, set on a thin strip of beach between the world's oldest desert and the cold Benguela Current. Founded in 1892 as the German South-West African port (the river-mouth on the Swakop, hence Swakopmund), the town now serves as the country's coastal-adventure capital and the natural counterpart to inland Windhoek. It is 365 kilometres west of Windhoek on the B2 (a four-hour drive through the Namib-Naukluft on tar all the way), 31 km north of Walvis Bay (Namibia's working deep-water port and the better wildlife-on-water base), and the southern gateway to the long Atlantic coast that runs north as the Skeleton Coast to the Angolan border. The town is cool and grey for most of the year — the Benguela Current keeps coastal temperatures between 15 and 22 °C even in summer, fog rolls in at night, and December–January is the only window of properly warm days. The architectural personality is concentrated on a few blocks around the Hohenzollernhaus, the Woermann House, the Old District Court, the Mole (the original stone breakwater) and the Jetty: half-timbered facades, ornate brick gables, a small Lutheran church and a sandstone lighthouse, all set against an immediate edge of dunes and wide Atlantic. The food and drink scene is famously deep for a town of 75 000 — the Swakopmund Brewery, Café Anton on Bismarck Strasse, Käpps & Konditorei (one of the country's better bakeries), the Tiger Reef beach bar, the Jetty 1905 fine-dining restaurant and the more recent specialty-coffee scene around Kramersdorf. Most Namibia itineraries spend two or three nights here — the natural pause-and-recovery point between the inland safari leg and the southern desert leg, with enough activities to fill those days.