Sossusvlei, Namibia by Mel

Hello everyone,
Last blog we did, we were in Walvis Bay and about to go south of it to Sossusvlei. We did just that on the 11 of June. The drive took us around 4-5 hours. It was a wonderful drive. First, we saw some meerkats!!!! This is an animal that we wanted to see, but didn’t manage to see so far: we did now! We were driving and Kev saw something running on the road and thought it was one of those ground squirrels we saw a lot. We still stopped to checked and realised they were meerkats!! So excited! Emma was extremely happy as she has been wanted to see them in the wild for ages. There was a big family of meerkats. They are fun and super cute.
We kept going after that and admire the landscapes. From Walvis bay, it is flat for a while, but then the landscape change and there are hills everywhere. But the hills are stripped, almost like they were made in sequence. I took some pictures, but they are never as good as reality. There were also mountains in the background. Just breathtaking.
On the way, we stopped at Solitaire, which is a small place where there is a bakery which is supposed to bake the best apple pie in the world. We wanted to try, but they didn’t have any at that time! So we got some food and coffees and took a small break. They also have old cars around the place, just left there, which make a bit of a cinematic scene.
We also stopped at the tropic of Capricorn which was on the way. There is a frame where you can take pictures, which we did of course!
We kept going and arrive at our camp which is inside the Namib-Naukluft national park. This park is the largest conservation area in Namibia and is a Unesco site. This park is absolutely amazing. The landscapes are some of the most beautiful to see.
On that first day, we went to visit the Sesriem Canyon. It is a natural canyon around 1 km long and 30 meters deep. It was carved by the Tsauchab river. There is only a small part which still have water in it all year long. Which mean you can walk at the bottom of it and admire the rock formations in it and enjoy the views from there. Which we did.
After that we came back to the camp, set up and had a lovely evening by the fire.
The next day, we woke up at 6am to get to the Big Daddy Dune in the Sossuslvei desert. The desert is known for the beautiful gold/red colour dunes. Some of those dunes are the tallest one in the world. The Big Daddy one is 325m high and we climbed it!
But first we walked in the huge white clay pan at the bottoms of the dunes with a dead forest in it.
A river used to run around here, but then the dunes came and bloke the access to the river. The trees which were there, became dry and even too dry to decompose. They are still here, burnt by the sun, 1000 years later. This is a beautiful sight: the white of the clay on the ground, those skeleton black trees with the red sand dunes on the background. Nature never ceases to amaze me with its beauty.
The more I travel, the more I realise beauty is everywhere: in the green of a rainforest, in the red of a sand dune, in the dark sky full of stars... beauty is everywhere, you just need to look up!
We did the climb… It was hard!!! Sand is very hard to walk in and even harder to climb in! When you walk, your feet keep sliding back down. It feels you are walking twice the distance!!! It took us around 2 hours to get to the top. Andrew was at the front, Kev behind him, Emma after and me, right at the back! I am not fit! It was really hard for me. But I did it!!! We all did. I was amazed by the kids on how well they did. The view from the top is worth it: dunes after dunes after dunes as far as eyes can see. Again the pictures don’t gave it justice. The climb down is so much easier! You just walk down on side of the dune, which is 33 degrees down (we learnt when we did our quad tour, that the sand on the dune start falling at 33 degrees, so a dune will never be steeper than 33 degrees). It was fun going down. Andrew did it in a few minutes, I took a bit more time as my legs were pretty tired, but it was a lot faster than going up.
After that we were way to tired to climb anything else, so we drove back, admiring the dunes from the car and then went back to camp.
We repacked all our bags properly (after 3 weeks in the car, there was crap everywhere!) as we were leaving the next day! We spent our last evening in Africa around the fire, talking about the thing we loved here.
The next day, we left super early, well before the sun was up to arrive on time to our plane in Windhoek.
Namibia had a couple of surprise for us: on the road, we came across a pack of hyenas. That was so cool as this is one of the animals we hadn’t see yet. We saw a couple of jackals, some zebras and some donkeys. It was lovely seeing a few more animals before we left.
We got to the airport with a bit of time to spare, got some food, checked our bags and we were off for the next part of our trip in Europe.
See you there.
MelLeia mais