Safari - Dunes and Dead Trees

Up early and on the road. We still have another day to make up for due to the Namibian Border debacle, and this was a day that we did it. We drove hard and fast to our next stop, skipping lunch along the way. Pulled into our campsite and before we even put up our tents, we had to make a decision about an activity. The Namib-Naukluft National Park with the dead trees, we could go see them right now or we would miss them. The park has a famous area called Sossusvlei, a weird salt flat smack dab in the middle of red and sandy dunes. In this salt flat are the skeletal remains of trees long dead. This desert is so dry that dead trees don’t decompose. The trees are called Dead Vlei and are over 1000 years old. I opted to go because where else do you get to see 1,000 year old dead trees? So we drive 45 minutes out to the parking lot, where we transfer to a 4x4 and drive an additional 5k to hike to the trees. The hike was probably only a km or less, but over super sandy dunes that I find hard on the knees. Everyone else left me in the dust as they kickup their pace and I made my way slowly over those horrible sandy dunes (have I mentioned before how much I hate sand). We had 90 minutes to get there and back and I watched the clock to make sure I was ok on time. Finally made it to the final ridge with 7 minutes to spare on my self assigned deadline. Instead of walking down into the trees, I used my superzoom to take some decent shots from the ridge and turn around and head back. Coming down the dunes was significantly easier than going up the dunes and I made it back with plenty of time to spare. In the end, I’m glad I saw the famous dead trees, but I have no interest in climbing up the sand again.

The following morning, we were up at 5am, so we could have breakfast at 5:30 and on the road at 6am. The gate opened at 6:15am and we raced to Dune 45 with the rest of the campers to watch the sun rise. It was a really nice sunrise, but I wasn’t about the climb another dune. It was just as beautiful from the truck. While we were watching the sunrise, Steve and Peter (our new guide) made our breakfast, which isn’t normally the case. It was a really nice treat and breakfast was great.