maybe the dogs tail might wag

And much of the Australian uranium exploration activity in Namibia is around the resort-style town of Swakopmund, which is around 300km west of Windhoek, the capital city, and 50km north of Walvis Bay. It's an excellent base for mining companies.
Walvis Bay is the only deepwater port in Namibia and is the most logical loading point for any resources that the companies get out of the ground in the country. There are also rail facilities in the area, such as those linking Rossing uranium mine to the port.

As for the 35,000-strong tourist town of Swakop, as the locals call it, it is a relic of Namibia's German colonial past and offers a little touch of Europe on the edge of the Namib Desert, flanked by massive sand dunes to the south and the Erongo national park to the north.

Swakop is a handy base because it is in the Erongo region that much of Australia's uranium interest is centred, in the same area as Rio Tinto's 68%-owned massive Rossing uranium mine and Paladin Resources' Langer Heinrich.

Swakop is only 80km away from Rossing and the town has everything a regional base could need – excellent accommodation facilities, first class internet and phone services, plus lots of places to eat and drink, always an attraction for Australian mining companies.

Of course, even if Swakop wasn't a pleasant little tourist town the Australians would be there anyway, because the real attraction for miners lies in the desert to the east and the massive undeveloped uranium deposits which they hope to find there.

The template for such deposits is, of course, Rossing - a massive open cut pit in the middle of the desert. At more than 3km long, 1km wide and 300m deep, it is the largest open cut uranium mine in the world and has been operational for more than 30 years.

While the deposit at the mine is considered low-grade at 300 parts per million or 0.3kg per tonne uranium, Rossing still supplies 7% of the world's uranium, averaging between 2000-4000 tonnes of uranium production per year.

The mine was due to be shut down last year but the life of the project has been extended out until 2016, and the mine's planned output is to be boosted to 4500 tonnes per annum within a few years.

Rossing's uranium mineralisation is hosted in a type of granite known as alaskite, which is also the source of much of the secondary sandstone-hosted calcrete uranium deposits, such as that found at Paladin Resources' nearby Langer Heinrich uranium mine.

The mine, which is only the second uranium mine in Namibia, began operation earlier this year and while Paladin has faced issues in ramping up operations, the company expects production to reach its target annual production rate of 2.6 million pounds uranium oxide by January 2008.

Butting up to Rossing and Langer Heinrich are tenements belonging to other Australian companies, including Bannerman, Extract Resources, Nova Energy, Deep Yellow, Erongo Energy, and Metals Australia.

Other explorers in the region include Uramin, a London-listed company which was taken over by French company Areva earlier this year. Uramin's flagship project is the Trekkopje deposit, which should become the third Namibian uranium mine.

Trekkopje has a measured and indicated mineral resource of 18.4 million pounds of uranium (61 million tonnes at a grade of 0.014%) and a feasibility study for the project is ongoing.

Meanwhile, Forsys Metals, a Toronto stock exchange listed explorer, holds the Valencia project, which has a probable mineral reserve of 117Mt of ore at a grade of 0.12kg uranium per tonne or 30.9 million pounds of contained uranium.

Of course, the most active explorers in the region are the Australian cohort. Both Bannerman and Extract have mobilised as many drill rigs as they can to target uranium mineralisation at their prospects, with both companies making ambitious plans to tap into the predicted global uranium shortage over the next decade or so.

Bannerman already has an interim inferred resource at Goanikontes of 27Mlbs of contained uranium oxide and is looking at an ambitious timetable over the next few years to delineate a much bigger resource and bring the project to production by 2010.

Meanwhile, Extract is also drilling furiously with three rigs mobilised and more on the way. The company has one eye on the Husab project and also at Rossing South, where it suspects it has discovered an exciting new deposit. Extract is also looking to outline a resource at Husab by year-end.