The dunes of Sossusvlei are the kind of place that almost doesn’t look real. Photographs help, but when you actually arrive the scale of it all is hard to comprehend.
These dunes sit inside Namib-Naukluft National Park, which covers roughly 49,000 square kilometers—one of the largest national parks in Africa and among the largest protected areas anywhere in the world.
The Namib Desert itself is also believed to be one of the oldest deserts on Earth, somewhere around 55–80 million years old.
The name “Sossusvlei” is itself a little linguistic mash-up of the region’s history. Sossus comes from the Nama language and means “dead end,” while vlei is an Afrikaans word meaning “marsh” or “pan.” Put together, it roughly means “dead-end marsh”—a place where floodwaters once flowed but now simply stop, trapped by the surrounding dunes.
Even in a desert this ancient, life persists in surprising ways.
On the drive, Abraham pointed out the mysterious “fairy circles.” These perfectly round patches of bare ground puzzled scientists for decades. One leading theory now links them to sand termites that live underground.
Unlike the towering termite mounds you see elsewhere in Africa, it’s simply too dry here for that kind of architecture. Instead, the termites build their entire colony underground—what Abraham jokingly called their “mansions beneath the sand.”
Termite societies are surprisingly sophisticated:
• a queen and king who reproduce (the queen can lay thousands of eggs per day)
• workers who gather food and maintain the colony
• soldiers whose job is to defend it
Unlike bees, termites actually have a king, and the queen isn’t constantly surrounded and “coddled” the way a queen bee is.
Even the desert has its own little civilizations.
Where the Sand Came From
Before we reached the dunes themselves, Abraham crouched down and drew a rough map of Namibia in the sand.
He explained something called the “Red Line.”
North of the line are mostly subsistence farmers. South of the line are the large commercial farms. The line originally served as a veterinary boundary meant to prevent foot-and-mouth disease from spreading between herds, but over time it created a kind of economic divide.
A goat raised above the line and a goat raised below it can have very different market values. Like N$2 versus N$30.
Then Abraham explained something else remarkable.
The sand of the Namib dunes—and even the famous Namibian diamonds—both originated in South Africa.
Over millions of years the Orange River carried sediment and minerals westward. Ocean currents and wind redistributed the sand along Namibia’s coast, and eventually the wind pushed it inland, forming the enormous dunes we see today.
When diamonds were first discovered along Namibia’s coast, the ostriches became accidental suspects.
Like chickens, ostriches swallow small stones to help grind food in their gizzards. The story goes that they sometimes swallowed the diamonds, mistaking them for grit.
A Slow Start (Thanks to the “African Massage”)
Many people visiting Sossusvlei line up early at the park gates when they open at dawn, which can create a bit of a morning scramble.
We, however, avoided that entirely.
The road leading into the park is what Abraham cheerfully calls an “African massage.”
Between the bumps, corrugations, and everyone urging him to slow down, we arrived after the early rush had already passed through.
Sometimes taking it slow has its advantages.
Dune 45 and the Road to Big Daddy
Our first stop was Dune 45 (later, when we returned, Lynn and Mary climbed partway up the slope to get the classic “standing on a Namib dune” photo).
But the real objective lay farther ahead.
To reach the final stretch of dunes you leave the paved road and continue on deep sand tracks that require true four-wheel drive.
Which, apparently, not everyone fully appreciates.
On the way in we spent about twenty minutes helping two young couples who had completely buried their car in the sand.
The sign does in fact say you must have 4WD, but one suspects someone had reasoned:
“Oh hey, Subaru is a four-wheel drive… it will totally do it.”
It did not.
While the guys tried digging and pushing, one of the girls stepped barefoot under an acacia tree after removing her flip-flops—only to immediately begin pulling thorns out of her feet.
This desert does not suffer fools lightly.
We ultimately had to leave them there because we simply couldn’t get the car out.
Later, however, Lynn spotted them at Deadvlei, which means they did eventually escape their sandy predicament.
Big Daddy
The largest dune in the area is Big Daddy Dune, rising about 325 meters (roughly 1,000 feet) above the desert floor. 1,000 feet doesn’t sound that high. It’s high. Believe me.
A narrow knife-edge ridge runs all the way to the top.
Barbara and Lynn were able to walk ½ way to Deadvlei, but had to quit there. Mary and Brigitte did make it all the way to Deadvlei, took photos, and headed back. Janice and Deb bear-crawled up a small section of the side of Big Daddy just to reach the ridge but immediately turned around and walked down.
Jean-Marie thought about following me but couldn’t manage it without poles—one step forward, two sliding steps back.
Those poles turned out to be absolutely critical. The wide baskets kept them from sinking into the sand. Janice had actually found them on Amazon and I immediately bought a pair; it remains unclear why she didn’t bring them and had to bear-crawl her way up instead.
I was about twenty yards behind them.
Step.
Sink.
Step.
Sink.
Eventually I reached the ridge.
And then I realized the real challenge wasn’t climbing up.
It was deciding whether to go all the way to the top.
I followed a small lizard up the ridge and started counting my steps.
I kept telling myself:
You’re not coming back here in this lifetime.
That thought turned out to be surprisingly motivating (if sobering).
Step.
Sink.
Step.
Sink.
The Ridgeline Encounter
Just as I reached the crest, something funny happened.
The ridge narrows dramatically at the top, and four people were coming down: two men and two women.
The ridge is barely a few feet wide.
The first man tried stepping off the ridge to go around me and immediately sank to mid-calf in the sand.
“No, no!” I called. “You can’t step off!” (Note: ChatGPT had cautioned me about that, when I had looked up the idea of climbing the dunes.)
He corrected course. I turned sideways, he turned sideways, and he walked past. The two women did the same.
The last man, however, was…how shall we say…a very large Lithuanian gentleman, wearing a bright yellow shirt that said “Lithuania.”
There was simply no graceful way for him to pass me.
So we basically rubbed bellies as he edged by.
I laughed and may have made a dramatic “Ohhhhh!” noise.
He turned bright red.
And his friend—already past us—burst out laughing.
Then they continued down the ridge.
And suddenly…
I was alone.
Just me and the wind.
From the ridge you can see the dune slope away, but then it curves downward out of sight. Somewhere far below lies Deadvlei, the famous white clay pan filled with ancient dead trees.
From where I stood, those trees looked like matchsticks. No, something smaller. Splinters.
To be clear, from the top, you cannot actually see the full descent if you are contemplating going over the side. The dune curves inward, hiding the middle of the slope.
I stood there for a while.
If someone else had been doing it…
If there had been someone to even grimace or give a “thumbs up” to…
If someone had been waiting at the bottom…
It would have been so much easier.
I walked down a little from the ridge following some faint old footprints in the sand.
“Maybe here,” I thought.
Then I saw another set farther down and tried that spot.
Then I walked back up again.
Back and forth I went, having a very serious conversation with myself.
The climb up the ridge had been a physical triumph.
But that first step down the side – instead of making a 180 and walking down the ridgeline?
That was entirely mental.
Finally I stopped negotiating with myself and simply took one step forward.
Once I did, gravity took over and I essentially sand-skied down the face of the dune.
And yes—
I was the only one in our group who did it.
And I did it completely alone.
No witnesses.
No encouragement.
No one even to take a photo.
(I did photograph my footsteps once I reached the bottom, but they don’t really convey the scale of the thing—you can only see the tracks from the lower slope up to the crease in the dune. The ridge itself disappears from view.)
But *I* know what it took to make that first step.
And honestly?
That moment may have been the bigger triumph of the day. One cup plus of sand in my shoes notwithstanding.
The Lithuanian Reunion
Later we stopped at Dune 40, where I decided to leave one of H’s marbles.
At the base of the dune there’s a large acacia tree with a knothole in the trunk.
That seemed like the perfect place.
H would have loved this landscape.
Abraham held the marble up so I could photograph it against the dune. When I came back he asked where I had placed it.
I told him.
He said he would think of H every time he visited that tree.
And I’m quite sure he will.
As I went back to visit the tree one more time before leaving, a vehicle pulled up.
Out stepped the same four Lithuanians from the ridge.
They recognized me immediately.
“You got down,” they said.
I tried to explain that I had gone over the side, though the language barrier made that tricky.
Then the thinner man—the one who had laughed earlier—walked up to me and gestured.
Clearly he wanted to re-create the ridgeline moment for himself.
So naturally I rubbed bellies with him.
Mary nearly collapsed laughing.
The big Lithuanian turned bright red all over again watching the “reenactment,” and I’m quite certain his friend now has a story about him that will be told for the rest of his life.
Sesriem Canyon
After returning to the lodge and grabbing a much-needed nap, we headed out again to visit Sesriem Canyon.
The name Sesriem comes from the Afrikaans words for “six thongs.” Early settlers supposedly stitched together six strips of oryx hide to lower a bucket down to reach water at the canyon bottom.
Standing down in the canyon is strange because the rock looks almost artificial—like concrete poured around river stones.
That’s because the canyon walls are made of conglomerate, ancient sediment where gravel and stones were cemented together by minerals when water once flowed through here far more regularly.
We took about a 40-minute round-trip hike, and I tried my best to capture the strange beauty of those walls.
Sunset on the Deck
Back at the lodge we had time for another short rest before Abraham gathered us on the deck above the bar to watch the sunset.
He had set up a small sunset bar—bubbly, wine, beer, the works.
Amazingly, the red turned out to be the exact same Tokara Shiraz that Mary had loved during our tasting at Tokara in Stellenbosch earlier in the trip—even the same vintage.
Of all the wines he might have found in the Namib Desert…!
The sun slipped behind the mountains, the desert turned gold and then purple, and we sat there drinking first bubbly and then Tokara Shiraz in the middle of the Namib Desert.
Not a bad way to end a day that had started on top of Big Daddy.
And somewhere out there, beneath a knothole in an acacia tree at Dune 40, one of H’s marbles is now part of the Namib, calmly watching Dune 40.
A small traveler in a desert that has been here for tens of millions of years.
And just for the record:
I was the only one who climbed the ridge.
And the only one who stepped off. 🌄🏆