The Namib Desert

The sky was beginning to glow, white, in the northeast, sharply defining the jagged silhouettes of surrounding ridges. A near-full moon ahead, on our left, backlit the scrub bushes and sparse Camelthorn trees that dotted the broad, flat valley. The small truck raced along the loose gravel road, raising a ghostly cloud of dust in the soft light of pre-dawn.

Around us, no human light or enterprise marred the landscape. No litter decorated the ditch. We seemed alone –just our little truck, the white gravel road and the glowing horizon.
Our Namibian host and driver, Jan, twenty-something and all blond, blue-eyed, broad-shouldered Afrikaner bravado, was taking us deep into the red dunes of the Namib Desert at Sossusvlei to catch the low morning light define the dunes and to search for the abundant desert life before it slipped too far into the cooling sands.

The Namib-Naukluft National Park is one of the largest in the world, stretching along the southern coast of Namibia – the size of Belgium and Scotland combined, according to Jan. It protects a huge variety of landscapes, from the semi-arid scrubland that we were racing through on this morning, to the vast sand sea we were heading into.

We had arrived late the day before after a punishing 5-hour drive on loose gravel roads across a seemingly endless landscape of scrubland and jumbled ridges of rock. Jan’s family’s farm, now the Little Sossus Lodge, is a cluster of red stone huts clustered around the dining hall, in the centre of a broad bowl where two roads meet. The view from our hut’s picture window had been of a few tall, lonely thorn trees, standing like twisted umbrellas in a vast expanse of rippling golden grass. The distant ridges encircle the landscape, red-black and barren.

After a welcome shower and nap, a gin and tonic and robust farm dinner of Oryx meat and farm-grown vegetables, we had hit the sack early in anticipation of our early morning excursion.
And here we were, after our race across the darkened valley, cooling our heels at the Park’s main gate while the government guards decided when they felt like admitting us. The sun had broken over the horizon with a stark white light, but the chill still kept us bundled in our fleeces and scarves as we took turns photographing each other against the entry sign.

It was, at last, officially deemed dawn, and the gates were opened to about a dozen other vehicles like ours who then edgily raced each other onto the blacktop – the first we’d seen since leaving the main highway out of Windhoek.

Within minutes we had spotted our first animals – a few meters to our right, a Springbok bounced comically all four feet together over bushes while just as close on our left, a black backed fox slinked through the grasses keeping a wary eye on both us and the too energetic antelope. A little further on, a stately tan, black and white Oryx stood grazing – its long straight horns reaching almost a meter over its head. And here and there, big black dots hovering over the grasses turned out to be massive ostriches, their stick-like legs and necks visible only as we got closer.

But the highlight of the drive were the immense red dunes, carved to razor sharp ridges by the winds, their sinuous lines lit in stark black contrast by the low morning sun. Gold dust of desert grasses cover the lower slopes and speckle their sides, never reaching the less stable crowns. Most of these dunes are ‘off limits’ to climbers to preserve the delicate plant and animal life that makes its home here.

But there are two dunes that are accessible – Dune 45, “the” place to climb, with its cluster of vehicles at the base and long, ant-like line of tourists, and “Big Daddy”, at the end of the road and at 280 meters, considered one of the tallest dunes in the world.
We bypass both, agreeing that we need neither to check off the ‘famous’ dune nor to challenge ourselves with a 2-hour trek. Instead, we choose to explore the wind-blown sand patterns and abundant life with Jan.

He parks the truck and we trek into some low dunes, stopping frequently to study the spoor of the animals that come out at night – beetles, mice, lizards, rabbit, foxes, Springbok and Oryx, even a leopard! We comb through the “desert muesli” – nests of grasses and seeds blown in from beyond the sand that provide a ready source of food for the smaller animals. We dig into the sand, following tunnels of the dune beetle, trying to catch him as he burrows away from us and watch a ‘left right’ beetle scatter sand one way, then the next, in search of something to eat or sand suitable for a mid-day burrow.

After a short hike along the ridge of the smaller dune, Dead Vlei comes into sight. A ‘vlei’, is a white pan of calcite where the rivers that may run once every 5 or 6 years, come up against unbroken dunes and form shallow, life-giving lakes, before sinking into the sands. Dead Vlei was cut off from flowing water 600 years ago, but its white bed is still dotted with the stark black skeletons of the trees that once drew sustenance from the infrequent floods.

It is one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen.

In the white desert light, amidst the towering ochre red, wind-smoothed dunes, under an impossibly clear deep-blue sky, the solid white lakebed and wind-blackened tree skeletons paint a stark 4-tone abstract of colour and shape. I feel alone in the immensity of place, as if I’m standing on a brightly lit sound stage in a set that Dali would have imagined.

On the drive back to the lodge, as the rising sun softens and then eliminates the shadows, we feel that we’ve truly seen one of the most beautiful sights in the world. We felt no need to ‘prove’ ourselves against the harsh elements of a 2-hour climb. Instead, we stopped, looked down, dug into the shallow sands and learned a much more about the world around us.