Red sands

11 October

Ballooning in the early morning over the Namib desert turns out to be a beautiful thing to do, with fantastic views over the huge red dunes in stark light and shade. Gazing straight down at the tiny specks of oryx and ostrich below. Champagne breakfast by the dunes afterwards was a nice touch (mmm… cured zebra is good). The outfit is run by Tracy, the absolute archetype of a bluff white southern African lady, although our balloon was piloted by Mike… who coincidentally was working for our balloon company in Cappadocia when we went on a flight almost ten years ago! Sounds like current politics has killed the tourism industry over there.

Ballooning is a wonderfully tranquil activity, but I suspect only if you are willing to lose yourself in the amazing view and the peaceful sky. If you spend too much time thinking about the hundreds of metres of empty space below the wicker basket you are standing in, and the rippling silk fabric of the giant balloon that is the only thing keeping you up, well then your enjoyment might start to suffer!

Even better than ballooning was exploring Dead Vlei in the late afternoon. What’s a vlei? Well, it’s the Afrikaans for lake, but in the desert that really means a dry clay pan (except for the few days in wet years when they fill with water).

Just when I thought I’d got used to the dirt roads, there was some real four-wheel-driving to do! A few kms before Sossusvlei and Dead Vlei the tarmac ends and there is simply a route twisting its way through the desert sand. It didn’t help my confidence to see that someone had got stuck less than 100 metres beyond the end of the tarmac! Some other folks pushed them out. And in the event I dealt with the sand just fine, ‘cos I’m awesome, and on the way back we even pulled over to help some Germans who had got themselves stuck, giving them a push after they deflated their tyres somewhat.

The Dead Vlei itself is an eerie and magical place, albeit with a theme of bleak. The most amazing thing is the stark simplicity of the colour palette – brick red dunes, bone white Vlei, charcoal black trees and azure blue sky. Four colours only. Very beautiful.

We took a slightly different route back to the car, climbing up the long sharp ridge of a dune, every footstep along the knife-edge sending sand pouring down one sheer face or the other. It was a great sensation, both vertiginous but also safe (the worst result of a misstep would be a long sandy slither to the bottom).

This detour and helping the stuck Germans made us pretty late for dinner, which left us with the table on the windward side of the lodge. Brrr! I have a feeling that wind might be the first kind of weather that springs to mind whenever I think of this holiday – it’s been blowing every day so far.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, October 28th, 2017 at 7:17 pm and is filed under Namibia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.