NAMIBIA: We rented a car in Windhoek, the capital of Namibia, and started our 2 week road trip through Namibia to Cape Town, South Africa. First stop: Etosha Pan National Park for our own "drive-thru" safari! Excellent campground in the park with amazing night-viewing of unsuspecting animals as they gathered near a well-lit watering hole near our campground! But if you stopped to think about it, those animals were also very close to where we slept unsuspectingly in our tents, and a few jackals did come sniffing around our camp too!
Next stop: Damaraland with its towering desert mountains (Brandberg), ancient rock-art petroglyphs at Twyfelfontein, the petrified forest and incredible desert campground with an amazing shower built right into a huge tree!
Next stop: Swakopmund. We drove through the barren desert of the Skeleton Coast to arrive at this beautiful, little coastal town that resembled something out of Bavaria - very evident German influence!
After a couple days relaxing and eating well in Swakopmund we set off on the long drive through the Namib desert to Sossusvlei. The vast Namib desert (almost 50,000 sq. km!) is almost 2000 kilometres from north to south but with an average width of only 100 km! We arrived at the Sossusvlei campground (actually several kilometres from the big dunes) in the late afternoon and since it was recommended to visit the dunes early in the morning for the most spectacular views (not to mention the hot sun later in the day!), we got to explore Sesriem Canyon which is hidden in the desert only a couple of kilometres away from the campground. The deep, narrow canyon is an amazing place to explore reminding me of something right out of Indiana Jones adventures!
The next morning, we set off before sunrise to climb famous Dune 45 as the sun came up and turned the desert sand to bright hues of red and orange (see photo above), spectacular!
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