Turning back to face the steady trail of footprints up the dune's knife edge, I marveled in fits of exhausted breathing and complete silence at the scene laid out before me. Soft, rolling red sand dunes beyond a barren plain, sleek as fresh paint. Tortured woody plants dot the landscape, a very occasional camelthorn tree in their midst. No vehicles. No people. Nothing except a sight that cannot be seen anywhere else.
Then I saw it. On the edge of the haze and blended quietly into the base of a distant dune. A strip of solid white, cut off by a steep orange slope. Not the familiar view, but this was the first tantalising morsel of a place I have read about for decades. A place so iconic its image is conjured up in the most authentic imagination of all Namibian adventurers; a place that belongs solely in photography exhibitions around the world, on the cover of yellow-squared magazines and the subject of the finest travel documentaries: Deadvlei.
Seeing a lifelong dream on the horizon is a strange experience, not least because you risk detracting from the other stunning place you are currently stood in. Sossusvlei's beauty is hard to overstate, and so far removed from anything else. Deadvlei was still a ways off, and would take a bit of a walk in the threatening rising heat of the late morning. I logged the sighting and began the slow journey over there, stumbling along the ridge of the vertigo-inducing dune.
To the north, the view from Sossusvlei's most imposing dune is over a daunting ebb and flow of deep sand, with no trails and no direction. To head off into that place would assuredly get you lost to the desert. I took the giant, sinking steps forward down the side of the dune and, after what seemed like an age of being soaked in sand from feet to head, I hit the northern end of the enormous clay pan, smashed into a million pieces by the ruthless heat.
We rested under a gnarled camelthorn tree to admire the view. To the right, a Booted Eagle landed on a miniature dune to our surprise. Skittish and cautious in a land where survival is everything, the eagle did not tolerate any form of proximity and quickly took off over the dunes and out of sight. Admiring the enormity of the clay pan, we were grateful for the shade - in severely short supply here.
Sossusvlei's pans are a cracked expanse of ancient white clay, criss-crossed with inch-deep grooves betraying the red sand beneath them. Salt and clay have set hard into the compacted surface, baked in the sun but much less scorching to the touch than the adjacent sand. There are a number of pans in close proximity, though across the Namib as a whole they are not a common feature.
Wearily edging back across the open pan to our safari truck under a tree on the far side, we stopped for the obligatory, deserted 360-degree panoramic photos from the centre of the flats and slumped into a half-shaded camping chair to have an unintentional snooze on the edge of the pan. I awoke to see a perishingly thin gemsbok scuff its hooves over a nearby dune and wander nonchalantly across the pan in front of me. This transposition of national symbols was the ultimate juxtaposition, and one not easily forgotten.
Joined by a host of weaver birds and finches of many different types, we spent an idle morning fashioning what was later dubbed the Sossusvlei Sausage Fry after breaking out the stove for a sorely needed boerewors and tamatie-sous sandwich - a rather coarse gastronomic throwback to earlier days spent in Africa. The birds appreciated it in any case as some perched on the rim of a mug to salvage what breadcrumbs remained.
Loading the stove back into the truck, I was struck by how little we had been disturbed by others. A pocketful of like-minded couples had turned up on occasion, each one immediately seeking their own solitude so as not to disturb the others. An unwritten code is in play here it seems. We braved the waves of loose sand again, daring not to stop as we turned off the 'road' towards Deadvlei.
A vehicle will only get you so far. After reaching the limit, we abandoned the truck and set out on foot. A deceptive two kilometre trek across soft flat sand saw us entirely unprepared for just how unbearable the sun, thirst and discomfort of walking this land in the midday sun can be. Unquestionably, it would be suicidal to set off for any length of time on foot in these conditions.
We drank our water orders of magnitude faster than we imagined, and the burning sand cut through our toughest shoes, the ever-rising sun sapping any remaining energy we had by the second. Reaching a field of fragmented clay ridges, we were grateful for the more tangible walking surface. Tok-tokkie beetles took refuge on microcosmic dunes, leaving a characteristic six-point pitter-patter of miniature footprints, etched into the sand for weeks in the abence of a breeze.
After what seemed an age, wiping the odious mixture of sweat and suncream trying to blind me from my eyelids, we stepped over a small lip of sand. Any discomfort, any weariness, any irritation is instantly swept away. You are, at once, confronted with a sight straight from the cover of a travel brochure. Not, however, the brochure you get when you walk into a travel agents and ask for a beach-bound getaway, but rather the one they give you when you quietly whisper your desire to escape humanity - to stop the planet and get off.
This is Deadvlei; the starkest of the clay pans near Sossusvlei. A pure, linen-white flat stretching for miles in the distance, engulfed by towering red sand peaks and punctured with preserved dark silhouettes of camelthorn trees - all smothered in a cloudless, solid blue Namibian sky. The effect is mesmerising, in every direction, until the haze of mirage and double-image on the horizon merges the sharp boundaries of the landscape features together in a seamless blend. It is, without question, the most pleasing and perfect environment I have ever seen, one that was etched in memory from photos long before we ever stood in its presence.
Deadvlei's trees are the most recognisable feature of the land - a graveyard of desiccated wood rooted inexplicably in the centre of the giant pan. Midday in summer is not an optimum time to arrive here if you're hoping for a comfortable visit, however it affords shadowless photographs to this astonishing scene of sterility that distract from the total lack of shade. The gnarled branches of the camelthorns have withered and collapsed over time, others still reach for the sky.
We got close to see a whole other world of empty valleys and ghostly arteries carved like tattoos across each and every branch. The trees are delicate - one should not touch them to preserve their fragile beauty - which comes as something as a surprise when one considers how difficult it is for anything to persist against the abrasion of the sand and the withering heat.
After standing all we could without shade, we made the decision to amble back while our water lasted and seek some shade in the solace of the truck, with a plan to return in the morning before the sun rounded the top of so-called Big Daddy; a colossal dune on the eastern aspect of the pan that affords a degree of shade early in the morning.
Downing a whole bottle of water we set off back to be greeted by the watchful gaze of a family of African Pied Crows. A splendid sight in their formal attire, the crows are larger than their Western counterparts and far less humble. We enjoyed their company for a time, the landscape still devoid of other travelers save for a lone Black-backed Jackal dropping in and out of sleep under a nearby tree. Mad dogs and Englishmen it seems.
We drove back up the searing highway past the now hazy, faded dunes along the Tsauchab riverbed back to the camp at Sesriem to wait out the severity of the heat. That evening we marveled at the sunset again from the top of Elim Dune, watching the sun edge into the dune sea and the shadows lengthening at metres a second. A race ensued down the steep rapidly cooling sands to get back to the car before the light went completely and we ended up lost.
We sweated through an evening meal at the only bar in Sesriem (oryx as usual, though no less delicious), the screen behind the bar playing regional and international news. We saw fragmented clips of Hage Geingob, the Namibian premier, and South Africa's Cyril Ramaphosa issuing by-the-hour updates on emerging coronavirus cases, still in double digits in Southern Africa at that time. This was to be our last connection with media for nearly a week. When we resumed, the world had changed, but the quiet luxury of blissful ignorance in that week has been sorely appreciated since.
After another harsh night's sleep and another review of the night's jackal action on the infrared camera, and we hit the road again at first light heading straight back to Deadvlei. Our aim was to catch a more subtle, shadowed view away from the severe midday heat. The sun hit the dune gallery again as we were halfway down it creating abstract orange peaks with dystopian green shadowing trees set against their walls. The effect is so unreal, even after being witnessed first hand.
We reached the Deadvlei junction again in the sand after a record-setting tyre deflation interval. Shuffling back across the, thankfully, much cooler sand, we encountered a jackal running off the main pan and into the first light's red desert. Where it was going who knows, but I am still unable to account for how an animal as complex and large as a jackal or oryx can survive out in these conditions.
Hugging the vanishing shade line as it retreated up the bank of the Big Daddy dune, my gaze caught the iconic Deadvlei trees again - no less incredible than when we had left them not a day before, but completely different in appearance. Long, streaking shadows tailed off each branch, forming intricate webs across the white of the pan. A blue hue was perceptible on the steep dune edges where shadows persisted - I can only assume an optical illusion from the orange of the lit aspect.
Kneeling in the cooler sand, we spotted a White Lady Spider half buried in the sand. I had read about these before our trip into the desert, and their alternative title of Cartwheel Spider. This creature is attacked periodically by a parasitic wasp that aims to plant its eggs in the spider, which in turn escapes by turning acrobat and cartwheeling down the steep dune slopes to escape the wasp. This elaborate exercise is repeated frequently to the frustration of each. We let the spider be, and resumed our wander among the dead trees.
The ferocity of the sun made itself known soon enough. Having literally been burned by the same experience the day before, we had a better idea of when to bow out this time and trudged back through the powdery sand across the same flats. An essential late morning rest under a camelthorn tree, making use of the stove and comfy chairs again, and we drifted through the waves of sand back to the staging point at the end of the paved road to reinflate the tyres.
An exhausted gemsbok eyed us lazily when we stopped, and made its way to a shaded retreat of its own. Photographing animals lying in shade when the surrounding environment is so bright is never easy but this antelope was a gracious subject and barely moved while I figured out the appropriate camera settings.
Once the car was road-worthy again and we'd taken our last glances back at the inimitable dune spectacle, we rolled back onto the tar again and sped off, trailing another rare off-road camper all the way out. A quick stock up of water and fuel at Sesriem while dodging a fistfight between fuel attendants vying for control of a mobile credit card machine, and we were off again.
The road quickly turned to washed-out ruts of fist-sized shale, sliding under the wheels and rocking the car violently every half-second. This bone shaking journey was to last hours as we ventured onto the ever-more spectacular and wild rocky landscape of a huge desert conservation reserve heading south. The accomplishment of bucket-list goals hung over us - how is one to feel about such things? Very contented it turns out.
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