…continued from the previous post.
We ate dinner in the lodge and spent a few hours slaving over the internet. Our bar tender dutifully served me a coke zero and a toasty cheese sandwich with a smile adorned by a small gold rabbit figure attached to his front tooth. “Why do you travel all the way to Namibia for vacation only to work in the lodge?" he asks me.
How to explain...without explainig the whole last six years of my life. "Well, I say, I’m not really on vacation. I travel and work, full time. I couldn't do it without my job, so I feel lucky." I explain. He shrugs, doubtfully.
“Don't forget to enjoy the full moon tonight,” he says. “The Namibian moon is nice.”
I promised him I would not forget, and he lays my internet ticket next to my sandwich.
He had nothing to worry about, though. We had an alarm set for 5:30 a.m., to boil our oatmeal water over our braai wood, drink a slightly smoky coffee under a full and bright silver moon and a clear sky of stars. We were first in line to enter the park and first to arrive at Dune #45, to hike the ridgeline under stars and twilight and post ourselves at the perfect spot to watch sunrise.
Soussouvlei dunes, Namibia
Soussouvlei dunes are unique to anywhere in the world. They would more aptly be described as sand mountains than dunes, and they glow a bright orange red, rather than the usual soft pink brown sand I’ve ever seen in dune form before. We planned to spend the whole day exploring. As we enjoyed the rising, changing light Andrew dug himself into a sand hole and played the silky red grains between his fingers. He scooped up a hand-full to find a tiny little bug with decorative beetle-wings in his sand-pile. The bug furiously paddled his legs to dig a hole in Andrew's sand, only for Andrew to shake the sand and re-expose said bug for closer inspection.
“Look at that little guy," I said, “He's so handsome!”
By this time the dunes which were a deep brown before the sun came up turned the orange of fire flame. The crests and ridges played with light and shadow in ways photographers camp out for hours to capture.
We had to keep moving, though. We wanted to visit Deadvlei next before the sun got too high in the sky. “Deadvlei” means "dead valley" and it boasts a series of dead trees standing hundreds of years without rotting for lack of water in the Namibian atmosphere. It's supposed to be a scene straight out of Mars, and best viewed while the shadows of the trees remain long in the morning or evening light.
But to get there, we must first climb down Dune 45.
“There is only one way to descend a dune,” Andrew says as he jumps from the ridge and runs the vertical surface flinging sand behind his heels. I squeal as I follow his footsteps, the dune avalanching beneath by feet. I surf my way down until I land on the hard surface below, both of us all smiles.
We return to the truck and zip down the only road through the park until we reach the end of the pavement and find the deep "snow-drift" sand piles we'd been warned sometimes trap unsuspecting tourists. Andrew shifts to four wheel drive and low gear, then we get some momentum and dive in. We bounce and swerve, pick our way through thick old tire tracks shifting beneath our truck as we push forward. "Maintain your momentum!” I holler over the din of the roaring truck engine. We grew up in snowy Utah, if we don't know how to drive sand piles in a fancy new 4x4, then they should confiscate our Green Jello Card.
Deadvlei, Namibia
We made it without incident to the trailhead at Deadvlei where we watched streams of tourists returning from the one mile out and back trail over to the Deadvlai valley. One Namibian woman is carrying the train of her sequeined bright yellow, floor length gown. She weaves her way around sand piles and desert bushes while chatting easily with her entourage of photographers. A place for Instagram Photos and Supermodels.
I don't have a supermodel with me, Andrew is going to have to do. He is always good to show scale, however.
Who knew dead trees could be so beautiful?
The biggest red sand dune in the area towered vertically above us, "Big Daddy.” Pete and Jen had hiked big Daddy, then descended down into Deadvlai from the peak. We came the back way into Deadvlei (the easy way!) but then knew when we saw The Daddy that we couldn’t possibly come all this way and not hike to the top of him, too.
So, we trudged up the side from Deadvlei, undoubtedly the steeper but shorter option. I complained the whole way. But, along the way, I met a lizard, a piece of grass drawing sand art, and few nice desert bugs, the kind who gather Namibian fog on their backs to drink the droplets of water when feeling parched. This kept me as cheerful as a sailor with sea-legs hiking a vertical sand dune in the midday heat can be.
Big Daddy dwarfs the people climbing him. And when we reached the top, we had a 360 degree view of all of the Soussouvlei park. Without something for scale, the whole valley looked as if it ould be only ripples left in a sand puddle on the beach, but this landscape is built of mountains over 1,000 feet tall. Big Daddy himself is 2400 feet. AhhhMAAAZing!
We had our lunchtime snacks taking this all in.
Then, we started our descent of Big Daddy, flying down his dune side just as before. Only this time, the Dune never seemed to end. We had to stop and take a break from running down hill a few times before we reached the bottom! Where we both had to remove our shoes to dump about a ton of sand that had packed itself into every available space.
I agreed this was fun and worth the climb, but my legs were toast and we were both ready to return toward some evening work over the nice internet, an ice cream bar at the lodge, and eventually chicken drumsticks and potatoes cooked over a campfire and paired with a nice South African Pinotage.
“What a day!”
