Everyone was up well before sunrise this morning as our plan was to head into the Namib-Naukluft National Park and climb dune 45 to watch sunrise. Unfortunately there are a lot of tourists with the same idea but we still made it. The view from the top out over the desert and dunes was spectacular! The colours were amazing. It was definitely worth the quite taxing climb :-).
We ate breakfast at the base of the dune before heading further into the desert to take a guided “Bushman’s walk” through a different part of the desert called Sossusvlei. It was fascinating. Sossusvlei means ‘river plain’ and is where the river is cut off by the dunes as they grow together. This cycles over hundreds of years until the river again breaks through the dunes and separates them. Our guide for this was a local man who had grown up in the desert and knew it like the back of his hand. He showed us how to find spiders, and lizards, and taught us about different plants, as well as the history of the people of the desert. He took us to Deadvlei which literally means ‘dead plain’ and is the dead section of the desert which used to be the end of the river. It is this amazing area of limestone rock with dead trees still standing throughout. It was beautiful!
We returned to camp after a fabulous morning to find our tents blown to the ground... well most of the groups tents... ours and 2 or 3 others were still standing. We were experiencing our first sand storm! It was awful! We ate lunch in the truck because it was impossible to eat outside and well we hid inside the bar after lunch trying to stay out of the sand. Thankfully our tour guide got the green light to move us an hour down the road to Solitaire, another campsite with not so much sand!
The wind here was not quite so bad and the ground was more gravel than sand so even though we still had to eat in the truck... it was much better!
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