Sossusvlei

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Sossusvlei

We had saved up to the end of the trip a visit to the iconic Sossusvlei sand dunes in the huge Namib-Naukluft Park.
Our last week was initially marred by the comfy air mattress deflating increasingly rapidly during the night. We finally found the hole and were able to plug it with chewing gum and Elastoplasts, amazingly that worked perfectly for our final two nights under canvas.
At the dunes we stayed in a campground in Sesriem Oasis, just inside the park. There’s a 60 km long drive with stunning orange sand dunes on either side leading down towards the main area for visitors. Here you can park your car and take a 4 by 4 shuttle a few km across deep sand into the Sossusvlei dunes.
On our first day there we walked a few km into the dunes to Hidden vlei. It’s a bright white salt pan surrounded by huge orange dunes. It’s quite beautiful and otherworldly. Later we hiked to the top of Dune 45, or at least tried to the strong wind meant we could only go part way, so turned around and went up the back way, we were truly covered in sand from head to foot after the excursions and I’m sure will take quite a bit of the experience home with us. Stayed up there to watch the sun go down, it was wonderful to watch all the changes in colour in the sand as the sun lowered from orange, to deep red to purple.
The next morning we were up early enough to be out of the gates as they opened at 5:15 am and drive down to Dead vlei, climb up another dune and watch the sunrise. Again the light was beautiful; we’ve taken far too many pictures! It’s called Dead vlei because of the dad trees in the salt pan, these make for good pictures contrasting with the white pan and the orange dunes.
Walking back from Dead vlei we kicked up a Sidewinder snake. Lovely pale coloured snake with excellent camouflage, as its name suggests it moves sideways keeping it’s body in a n ‘S’ shape. It followed us, as we changed direction it did too, kept on coming towards one or other of us, once we picked up our pace it slithered off under a bush.
After a day in Windhoek the trip is over, it seems to have gone by far too quickly. We covered 9000 km in our little car and have probably taken almost as many photos (only joking!). We loved being back in Africa again, the landscape, the people and of course the animals.

Already back in Hong Kong, this will be the last blog in this series.

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