Once upon a time this was an oasis. There was a river flowing through, nourishing these 500-year-old acacia trees. But the river decided to go elsewhere, and the acacia trees could not follow. In the hot, arid desert climate they dried upright, like skeletons from better times.
The dark scraggly trees against a white lake of salt and the red dunes and blue sky is one of the most photographed landscapes in Namibia. And at 7.30 am it is all mine. I am the only person on the entire salt pan.From time to time (not even once a year), the rains come and the dry white pan becomes a flooded lake. When an oryx walks across the mud, its footprints dry up like those of dinosaurs, waiting for the next rains to come.

Deadvlei also serves a more modern purposes: fashion shots. And less fashionable tourist shots. That’s me on the far left. (Deadvlei, Namib-Naukluft Park, Namibia; July 2017)

7.30 am on the Deadvlei salt pan. It is as if I am the only person on a foreign planet. A Martian on a red planet of sand, where water once existed but is now long gone. This must be how the space-age people of the 60s imagined walking on Mars to be like. It is quiet. Still. The air is chilly but strangely easy to breathe, even with the dryness. There are no sounds anywhere, except for my team mates and two other crazies trying to ascend the Big Daddy dune, far above.

The echolessness of the desert is too strange to get used to.  It is not just the lack of an echo, but the lack of any sound. There is no sound of birds, people, traffic, or even the wind in the trees – because there are no trees, and often also no wind. And the sound that there is is somehow muffled. As if one were in a padded chamber for lunatics. Standing in the still desert reminds me of the movie Truman Show, where Jim Carrey plays a man who has a lovely suburban middle class life – until he one day wakes up to realize his world is literally a stage and everything in it is scripted and televized. He begins to seek the boundaries of his physical world and comes to the end of it: at sea, outside of town, he touches the side of the dome which he always thought was the sky and the horizon. The water splashes towards it and all sounds are muffled, as if he were inside a room. Endlessness isn’t endlessness, but finite and staged.

My friends, hungry for sights and sheer exhaustion, are making their way up the 325 m tall dune Big Daddy. It has a rough start and a muscle-wrenching end, and in-between those two it is long and winding. While I wander around on the Deadvlei pan by myself, I can hear my friends cheer each other on. It is so quiet we can have a conversation: I down on the salt pan and they up on the ridge of one of the tallest dunes in the world.

At 8.30 am the first group of (other) tourists begin pouring in. Chinese, with big cameras, shouting instructions to each other as to where to stand for a best pose and effect. This is not Mars. This is still the Earth, just more wondrous than I thought.
(Deadvlei, Namib-Naukluft Park, Namibia; July 2017)

We camped under a full moon at the overflow site, away from tourist buses and noisy families. We lit the braai fire under the tree, under a full moon, with lizards keeping us company. At night as I walked the 200 m stretch from the tent to the bathroom facility, I needed no flashlight because the moon lit up the sand. Somewhere, not far away, I heard the agitated grunt of a grazer, maybe a zebra or an oryx. Either it had a quick disagreement with a herdmate, or it was very quickly killed. Only the moon knew which one was the case. The jackals were howling in the distance. Thank goodness each campsite in Namibia has guards patrolling the area day and night.

We rose in the dark and passed through the Sesriem gates before first light, at 5.45 am when they opened, aiming for some of the most famous sights in Namibia: the Sossusvlei salt pan, the Big Daddy dune, Dune 45, and the Deadvlei salt pan. It was a magical 1-hour drive through the river valley, with dry savannah on the sides flanked by tall, red dunes. The desert here is one of the oldest in the world. The red sand of Southern Namib comes from the Kalahari desert. When the Sossusvlei area was under the sea the Kalahari sand got washed in and stayed as the sea dried up to the desert it is now. The beaches became dunes. Some of the tallest dunes in the world are in Sossusvlei and the coast around Walvis Bay.

The last stretch to the salt pan must be with a proper 4WD, or preferably, a safari vehicle. Sossusvlei means a “dead-end marsh”. Most of the time it is not a marsh but a white, hard pan of salt. It becomes marshy only when it rains, and the rainwater cannot exist the pan but stays in the dead-end of the river valley.(Sossusvlei, Namib-Naukluft Park, Namibia; July 2017)