Dear Readers, after a night at a reserve close to Windhoek, we head off towards the dunes at Sossusvlei and the Namib desert.  What a shock it is after the grey of London to be surrounded by such enormous expanses of sky and sand! We stop off to admire these sociable weaver nests – from a distance they can look as if someone has thrown a duvet over a branch, and indeed sometimes the nests are so large and heavy that they bring the tree down, and the birds have to start all over again. The birds are completely unfazed by our presence, disappearing into the nearby grassland to pull out some plant material to repair the ever-growing nest.

Twenty metres away is a signpost showing that we’re crossing the Tropic of Capricorn, so of course we have to get a photo. I feel a bit like a Christmas tree festooned with cameras and binoculars, but there we go.

Off we go. We’re headed to the Dead Valley Lodge, which is a ‘tented camp’ though not as you’d usually imagine it. The advantage is that it’s inside the national park, so we can set off early to be at the Sossusvlei dunes before it gets too hot. It means a 4 a.m. start but hey, we can sleep when we get home.

 

Food in Namibia is very meat-heavy, with a lot of game on offer – you can munch on every kind of antelope if you want. There is usually a vegetarian offering, but I suspect vegans would find pretty thin pickings, though where there’s a buffet (as here) you could probably find enough to eat, and the salads were always fresh and tasty. I developed a liking for ‘rock shandy’, which is lemonade or ginger beer, soda water and Angostura bitters, a most unusual combination but very refreshing after bouncing around in a jeep for hours, and a nice change from the local Hansa lager.

As the sun went down, the colours of the surrounding mountains were, well, undescribable…

Off we go at 4 a.m.! There is already a queue of vehicles waiting to get to the dunes at sunrise – many will stop off to climb the nearest, most accessible dune. We’re heading a bit further away, to Dead Vlei, a dune system with a dead lake in the middle. This has been the scene of many car adverts and feature films, and our guide Andrew, who was also a bush and microlite pilot, had often worked with the film crews.

One of the dunes is called ‘Big Daddy’, and some people will walk up it to see the ‘sand sea’ that surrounds it. Our party didn’t, it already being 30 degrees (it got up to over 40 degrees while we were there). Walking on shifting sand is very tiring, what with that one step forward and one step back feeling.

As you might expect, the dunes don’t have a lot of obvious life (though a later ‘Living Desert’ trip showed how deceptive this could be). However, where there are bushes there’s a surprising amount of bird and mammal life. This Nara plant (Acanthosicyos horridus) was providing shelter for a whole community of Xeric Four-Striped Rats. The plant is unusual in that it’s given up developing leaves altogether, to protect itself against water loss, and photosynthesizes via the stems instead. The roots of this plant can go down 100 metres in search of water. It’s a member of the melon and cucumber family, and the fruits are most unexpected – the pips are used to make an oil and are also tasty and widely eaten, giving the plant the alternative name of ‘butterpips’. Nara is also the name of the local people who live in this area.

Off we go, up a smallish dune, to get into Dead Vlei.

Dead Vlei is a clay pan between the dunes, created when the local Tsauchab river flooded, leaving a series of lakes. These persisted long enough for camel thorn trees to grow, but as the lake dried up the trees died, probably about 1000 years ago. These days, just the dry stumps remain, and very atmospheric the area is too.

People come here to have their wedding photos done, trudging up the dunes in white lace or while wearing dinner jackets. There’s nowt so strange as folk.

As you might expect, there are a few ‘do’s and don’ts’, which a few will always ignore…

This really was an extraordinary place. Everyone managed to get this far, and we heard tales of how people used to land their small planes in this place, get out for a walk and then fly off somewhere else. Flying safaris are still much favoured by those rich enough to afford them – Namibia is a big country, and we certainly spent a lot of time on the road. But for me, travelling by road, at a relatively slow speed, means that you have a chance to appreciate what you see, and how the landscape changes.

And then, we sit under a tree for breakfast, and are joined by a whole flock of Cape Sparrows. They are particularly pleased when our guide Hano makes a little water bath for them out of a plastic bottle, which they then follow up with a dust bath. I suspect that most of us are feeling the need for a shower by now, but I have been bowled over by the sheer strangeness of the landscape that we’ve seen, and by the adaptations of the plants and animals who live there.