Postcard from the Namib desert dunes

It hadn’t really occurred to me until this visit to Namibia, that there are — in people’s minds at least — two types of desert. There’s the one you might see in an old Western, with the occasional cactus or other vegetation and where the ground is hard enough to ride or drive on. The second consists of rolling dunes, crafted by the winds, where the sand seems soft and lifeless. At Swakopmund, there was the first, so we admired the plants’ abilities to conserve water and the relative abundance of bird, reptile and insect life.

Here in Sossusvlei, it’s the dune type. We’re staying at the entry to the park and coaches, Land Rovers and other tour vehicles queue at the gates to be allowed in before it opens at 6:30 a.m. because the dunes are about 60 km into the park.

Contrary to what you might think, the dunes don’t move much with the winds. It would seem there is some stability to their shape, even to their existence, coming from the rock formations underneath and to the consistency of the winds. You are allowed to walk up certain dunes (which is ridiculously hard work, as you slide backwards in the sand about the amount of the step forward) and down, which is immense fun, rather like wading through deep snow. At the bottom, there’s a salt pan with dead trees, because it hasn’t rained for so many years.

And, as we all know thanks to David Attenborough, there’s of course plenty of wildlife. There are ants eating the otherwise inedible grasses, enormous beetles, aggressive spiders buried in the sand, geckos, lizards that stand on two feet to avoid getting all their feet hot at the same time and the infamous Sidewinder snake, which makes a pattern like the horizontal slats of a blind as it progresses up the dune. We even saw a Spotted Eagle Owl, resting in the shade with eyes half open.

The real problem with these desert drives is they get you back to camp at lunchtime, the hottest time of the day and when there is not really much to do, other than wait for evening to come and for the heat to subside. It’s not helped that we are staying in a tent — a nice one, mind you, with a bed and an adjoining bathroom — but it is so hot that the only place in the whole resort at a comfortable temperature is the office where the guides hang out. I wonder why that is…

We’re now heading via a long drive to Windhoek, to one of our favourite places in the world, Cape Town. As someone once said to me, it’s the best place in the world, provided you can stay alive.