Namib Desert, Namibia

Today was our big day to see the famous dunes and dead trees in Sossusvlei and Deadvlei!

We had breakfast at 5am and were on the road by 5:30am. It’s about a 25 minute drive from Hoodia to the park gates at Sossusvlei. Once inside, it’s a 61km drive to Sossusvlei itself; and then a few km along the dry sandy river bed of the Sossus to finally get to Deadvlei. The last bit requires an experienced driver; our guide/driver Enis (sp?) had been doing this for 15 years and he said he had seen many tourists stuck.

There’s activities along the way to Deadvlei like climbing Dune 45 that some tourists stop to do in the cool early morning, but we were most interested in Deadvlei and so booted it there.

There’s lots of dunes along the paved 61km drive, and with the sun just rising, looked amazing. I took a lot of drive-by pics at 70km/hr.

Along the sandy part, just before we arrived at Deadvlei, we passed by an oryx, perfectly posed beside the road, with some particularly nice-looking dunes in the background. The contrast of the red dunes, blue sky, green desert plants, and black-and-white oryx was really cool. We asked Enis to stop and took a few pics and then carried on. Later we looked at the pics and it was our favourite, almost like an AI generated pic.

From the parking lot it’s a 1.1km walk in the sand to Deadvlei. There were some tourists on their way back already (there are a couple lodges inside the park, they can get to Deadvlei for sunrise). Aside from them, we were the first of the 6am entry folks to arrive. We could see lots of tourists spilling out of their vehicles behind us, so we picked up the pace.

And then we were there! It’s quite amazing. I was also amazed that we had the place to ourselves, at least for a few minutes, so that I could get tourist-less pics. Our guide said that in busy season, there’s up to 6,000 people per day that visit.

I took hundreds of pics. The sun was still low enough to have great lighting. There were more trees than I had realized. Enis explained that the trees used to be sustained by the occasional heavy rains that would flood the Sossus. About 900 years ago, sand dunes cut off the Sossus. The occasional rains were just enough to turn the surface clay at Deadvlei into a solid surface, choking off the trees. Because the desert is relatively lifeless, there’s nothing to decompose the trees.

We stayed at Deadvlei for over 90 minutes, and then carried on with the excursion. Saw some more dunes, and made our way to Elim for a picnic lunch. Enis set up a carpet, table with table cloth, even a hand washing station! It was just like in a travel brochure. While he was setting up, a couple male oryx had a little turf battle, butting heads and locking horns. The older oryx won but was bloodied a little. This all happened about 100m from us, but Enis said we weren’t in any danger.

After lunch we had a quick stop at ?? Canyon and then headed back to the lodge. We were beat from the early start and the heat.

We all napped over the afternoon, and then had another tasty dinner. I think we were finally over our jet lag cause we had our first solid sleep on the trip.