Eddy turned Sossusvlei's tallest dune into a competition before his knee had a say in it. What we found at the top, and later in a canyon most visitors to Sossusvlei never see, stuck with us longer than the climb did.

Ours were the first tracks up that morning.

A race neither of us had trained for

The evening before, Darius took us partway up a smaller dune for sunset, on purpose. “Let's not overdo it,” he said, saving our legs for the real climb the next morning. Eddy turned it into a contest anyway. “I need the challenge as well,” he told Max, half joking, half not.

We left the lodge at 5:11am and took a 4x4 for the last stretch through the sand, which Darius called an African massage. It pitched and dropped the whole way while we held on. At the dunes it was 18 or 19 degrees, cold enough that we ate breakfast standing under a tree before the sun got serious.

The sand is cold, so I took my shoes off.
Eddy

Big Daddy filled the whole skyline in front of us, with a smaller summit beside it the guides call Big Mama. Eddy declared the others didn't stand a chance, then immediately admitted his knee, still not fully right since the wet climb back up at Calandula Falls three weeks earlier, was swollen again and he'd already taken ibuprofen for it. Both were true. He climbed anyway, just slower.

Slower, but still both climbing.

The last stretch belongs to whoever's still smiling

The ridge up Big Daddy is narrow and it gets softer as the sun warms the sand, so every short gain in height cost more than the one before it. We'd climb for a few minutes, stop, look at the shadows stretching out below us, and go again. By the last, steepest section, the trash talk from breakfast had turned into just breathing and the occasional joke about wanting a flying saucer to get the rest of the way up.

  • Book the earliest slot your lodge or the park gate allows. The sand stays firm and cool for maybe two hours after sunrise, and both the climbing and the heat get a lot less forgiving after that.
  • The ridge looks like a single clean line from below. It isn't. Expect false crests, where what looks like the top is just the next rest stop.
  • Whatever your fitness, budget for the last third being the hardest part regardless. It was for all three of us, knee or no knee.
Close enough to see the pan we were about to run down into.
What an experience.
Eddy, at the top
Six to nine hundred years old, and none of it has rotted.

Documentaries, then this

Getting down was the reward for getting up. We sank our heels into the sand and ran, half slid, straight down the steep face into Deadvlei, laughing at how little it had in common with the climb.

Deadvlei means dead marsh, and it earns the name plainly. The camel thorn trees here died 600 to 900 years ago, when shifting dunes cut the pan off from the river that used to flood it. The desert is too dry for the wood to rot, so they're still standing exactly where they died, black against a floor of cracked white clay, with orange dunes on every side and a sky that reads almost navy against all that colour. “You're not supposed to touch these trees at all,” Eddy said, and we didn't.

We only watched this scenery on the documentaries. Now I'm here.
Max

The ground is hard enough that voices carry oddly across it, which makes an otherwise silent, eerie place feel strangely busy. We didn't stay long. The heat by late morning was already a different, harder kind of thing than the cold breakfast a few hours earlier.

The canyon nobody else in the park seemed to want.

What we'd add if we went back

Most people who make it to Sossusvlei never see Sesriem Canyon. It's not the reason anyone flies to Namibia, and after a morning like ours it would have been easy to skip too. We went that evening with Darius instead, and it turned out to be the calmest hour of the whole trip.

The first thing we heard was a warning about baboons raiding parked cars nearby, which is exactly the kind of detail nobody puts on a map. Down in the gorge itself the air was noticeably cooler. Eddy pointed out how irregular rain had cut into the sandstone over thousands of years, until parts of it collapsed and opened the narrow passage we were walking through. We climbed a stairway back out and that was the day, start to finish.

  • Do the dune before anything else. Everything else in the park is easier once the hardest part is behind you.
  • Save the canyon for the same evening rather than a separate day. It's a short stop and the low light suits it better than midday would.
  • Lock the car and don't leave food out at Sesriem. The baboons there know exactly what a door handle is for.