In the land of giant sand dunes

---

After another 4 hour drive - it takes at least 4 hours to get anywhere round here - we are at the Desert Homestead. Like most places it is in the middle of nowhere. Nowhere in this case is on the outskirts of the Namib Naukluft park and near the tallest sand dunes in the world.

The journey here did have one highlight and that was that we crossed the Tropic of Capricorn. There was a huge sign to inform us of this fact so needless to say we had to get out to take a (well several) photos.

Today we headed to Sossusvlei in search of the dunes and after a slight bit of driving in the wrong direction we found them. They were huge - over 300 metres in places. As well as seeing all the dunes along the road we walked to Dead Vlei and Hidden Vlei. Dead Vlei is an old pan, which has the skeletons of Acacia trees in it. Apparently some of them are over 500 years old. This seemed quite a busy place by Namibian standards although Hidden Vlei did appear to be hidden from the majority of tourists and there was only us and 2 other people there.

Obviously we could not look at all these sand dunes without climbing up and then running down some!

---