Our goal is to enter the dune area as early as possible this morning, which means a pre-dawn start and breakfast on the go. As we are staying outside the National Park, we will enter the dune area as soon as the gate opens at sunrise.

The best time to photograph the dunes is early morning. This is when you can see towering dunes illuminated a glowing orange, apricot red on one side and swathed in shadow on the other. The depth of the field is spectacular at this time of day. From Sesriem, we cover the 60 km into the dunes quickly and arrive at the 2×4 car park where all 2-wheel drive vehicles have to stop. From here, we enter the ancient Tsauchab River bed for the last 5km leg to Sossusvlei itself. 

The Tsauchab River is ephemeral; it only flows seasonally, when there is enough rain, and for the most part, the riverbed is dry. Aeons ago, during these rare floods, the Tsauchab sometimes received enough water to flow to the Atlantic Ocean. However, as the millennia passed and the dune fields began to form (around five million years ago), wind-blown sand invaded the riverbeds. The rivers became increasingly constricted by sand until eventually the occasional floods could no longer break through the sand barriers that had been formed by the wind. The valley we drove along this morning to get here is kept free of sand by the Tsauchab, but Sossusvlei is now permanently water’s end. Sossusvlei does still sometimes flood (perhaps once in a decade). After good rains in the Naukluft Mountains, where the river rises, Sossusvlei can become inundated, and the lake that this creates can last for many months, but no longer can the river find its original path to the Atlantic.

There is a 4×4 shuttle service that will transport us through the sandy terrain of the riverbed. We will visit Dead Vlei, an ancient pan surrounded by dunes, which is strikingly populated with dead, skeletal camel thorn trees. These trees have been a feature of this landscape for over 1000 years. Sossusvlei is almost surrounded by dunes, just one narrow path kept open by the Tsauchab River. We have time to explore the area on foot and to climb one of the highest dunes in the world, some towering 300 m above us, the views are breathtaking and justly famous. We drive back the way we came (there is only one road), stopping at the iconic Dune 45 (so named as it is 45 km from Sesriem. There is time to climb Dune 45 if you still have energy, or perhaps just sitting in the shade at the base of the dune will suffice.

Driving back to Sesriem, we take a short excursion to see the Sesriem Canyon. Only four km from Sesriem, this canyon has been carved out of the landscape by the Tsauchab River. Around two million years ago, there was an ice age in Europe. This caused glaciers to form and resulted in a worldwide drop in sea level. The knock-on effect of this at Sesriem Canyon was that it increased the length and water flow of the Tsauchab River. This greater force of water allowed the Tsauchab to begin cutting through the terrain, resulting in the canyon we can see today. We can easily walk into the riverbed, it is usually much cooler in the canyon, and we can follow the river for some way along its journey to Sossusvlei. We head back to our accommodation in the late afternoon.