Namibe is the run down provincial capital of Namibe province, bang in the middle of the desert, along the Atlantic coast. The weather is freezing cold. A humid mist brought by the gulfstream from Antarctica never really dissipates. There’s a disused racetrack just as in Benguela, plenty of closed shops and hotels, one restaurant, three cinema’s (two are closed as well) and a downtrodden fishing port. The desert around Namibe is home to the welwitschia, a flesh eating dwarf conifer which attacks people and sucks blood, so the legend goes.