In the southern Namib Desert, surrounding by enormous red sand dunes, Sossusvlei is the country's most spectacular attraction. Its landscape is a huge gleaming clay and salt pan which stays dry, sometimes for years.
The following morning we were up pre-dawn in order to get back to the breakfast area and then to the National Park entrance ready for the sunrise opening. From there we had about a 45km drive to the main dune (unimaginatively named Dune 45) but we had a short stop en route.
It's practically impossible to convey the size of the dunes - they are just enormous.
Then we drove on a bit and climbed Dune 45.
Except it was really difficult in thick sand with a 8kg backpack full of cameras and also that we were really climbing up a knife edge and after a while it got too high for Ian and too much like hard work for me.
So we decided to come down and spend the rest of our limited time trying for more “creative” shots. This young lad had literally run past us on this way up and then he ran down the hard way.
Eventually we moved on and transferred into 4x4 trucks for a 10 min drive to Dead Vlei where the river used to flow to before it was cut off by a sand dune – it translates as Dead Valley and all the trees are Vachellia erioloba (Camel Thorn Trees). We’d assumed the truck was taking us right up to it but we had a hard 20 min walk again over sand dunes to get there – how glad we were that we hadn’t persevered to the top of Dune 45 and used up all our energy.
We probably didn’t have enough time to take in the beauty of the place before heading back again to the truck.
We then had a short drive in the 4x4 around the Sossusvlei dunes area.
We then had a short drive in the 4x4 around the Sossusvlei dunes area.
From there we drove to the Sesriem Canyon, so named by the first settlers in the area as they had to tie 6 riems (thongs) together to lower a bucket down to get water. Now completely dried up it was still an interesting walk, although quite a difficult climb in places.
Despite the lack of water, there were a couple of plants still flowering and seemingly thriving.
The afternoon was spent relaxing back at the chalet and then at 1800 we joined Carlos around the braai and he cooked a delicious BBQ. It seems you have to do just about everything in his job – Guide, Naturalist, Driver, Porter and also Chef – a very knowledgeable and entertaining guy, albeit a total red neck.
After dinner I had another go at the stars but only briefly as we had another early start for our long 6 hour drive to Swakopmund on the coast.
