Everyone's Desert

The soaring red dunes of the Namib make Sossusvlei one of Namibia’s most popular tourist attractions. But can you still feel the spirit of the desert with all those tour buses around? You can. Here’s your guide.

- Toast Coetzer

The sun sings its quiet, persistent song and the heat rises from the earth under your feet. You squint. A mirage wobbles and takes shape. What is that? It’s grey, black and white; unmistakably a gemsbok. Yes, a gemsbok on Sossusvlei!

This is one of the most beautiful landscapes in the world. Around you the red dunes of the Namib stack up as high as city buildings. You walk on the rock­hard, pavement­like surface of the dried ­out vlei. Imagine if unusual rain thrust a flood all the way down here from inland. Water! Here! It happens.

Now you walk to nearby Dead Vlei, cresting a low dune or two. Dead Vlei is the home of Namibia’s most famous postcard photograph: dark skeletons of camel thorn trees against the orange dunes, frozen in time like marionettes on a stage.

And you’ve just stumbled onto that stage, into the middle of a set piece in slow motion. The Namib is the world’s oldest desert: What you see around you has been in the making for two million years. But that’s nothing, because this living sea of sand has more sand beneath it – old enough to have become rock. The rock is called Tsondab sandstone, and some of it is estimated to be 20 million years old.

It’s hard to think of 1 000 years passing and impossible to make your brain grapple with two million years, or 20 million years. Yet here you are, walking in the Namib Desert, as old as time.

Dead Vlei is a powerful node in this desert, imbued with shape, form and beauty in what might seem like endless, featureless sand. It also has a way of quieting you down, slowing your pace, sharpening your observations.