Sesriem, Namibia

First job of the day – tea and coffee. Choice – get out the gas burner and boil the kettle or plug our travel kettle into the ridiculously placed electric socket 😂

Sesriem and nearby Sossusvlei make up the area in Namibia which is the famous desert scenery of the Namib desert and the classic postcard views which everyone associates with the dunes falling into the ocean. In fact, Sesriem and Sossusvlei are 60km apart with the (tarmac) road wending its way through the narrowing corridor with dunes on either side.

The dunes are numbered and the classic one to climb is Dune 45. As we parked at the bottom Hoppy had a serious sense of humour failure and claimed that he had no knowledge that “we were actually going to climb the bloody thing” 😂. Obviously he has a serious dodgy knee but, after threatening to leave him at the bottom, off we set – I think he looks quite Churchillian with his new hat!

Turns out (quelle surprise) that it’s actually quite steep and hard going in the sand:

After about half an hour the old man decided that enough was enough and his poor old knee was really struggling so I went on alone:

Actually, him sitting there gives a really good indication of the scale of the thing!

Eventually you reach the point where there are no more footsteps:

By the time I was coming down Hoppy had made it back to the car and took some photos of me:

From Dune 45 we moved on to Sossusvlei, where the last 5kms of the track are sand and it’s strictly 4×4 only (shuttles are there for people who don’t have the right kind of vehicle).

I should say before I proceed with this that I have had full permission to take the piss out of Hoppy mercilessly for what happened next and please all feel free to continue this theme in the comments. We had been advised by Benito to drop Naomi’s tyres to 1.6 pressure at this point but Hoppy decided he didn’t want to do that because we don’t have a compressor and would have to drive the 60kms back to the garage at Sesriem very slowly. It all started so well:

But, yes, as you’ve probably all anticipated we got stuck. Well and truly stuck. There was a LOT of swearing (him) and a lot of biting my tongue from saying “I told you so” (me). We were just getting the spade out (he STILL didn’t want to drop the tyres) when a shuttle vehicle full of German tourists came along. The driver and the German guide got out and, basically, took over. Kicked poor Naomi’s tyres, tutted (a LOT), released 30 seconds of air from each tyre and then the driver got into Naomi and, with a bit of to-ing and fro-ing got her out, parked her in the shade under a tree and told us he’d send a car to drive us the rest of the way to Sossusvlei, all to much laughter and cheers from the Germans.

Well ……….. the earlier sense of humour failure now reached epic proportions (as I’m sure you can imagine). He wanted to drive Naomi but was – essentially – told that they wouldn’t let him! FURY does not even begin to describe it!! We were duly picked up by another shuttle (for a fee!) and driven off, leaving poor Naomi ignominiously under her tree.

It’s about a half hour walk to Dead Vlei from Sossusvlei and he stomped along in livid, humiliated silence!!

Dead Vlei is an old pan with the skeletons of trees left, some of them over 500 years old – it’s one of the classic photographic scenes from Namibia:

I’m pleased to say that after all the stomping and silent fury, we met an utterly charming Belgian couple – Mike and Jolene – who had a compressor and arranged to meet us back at the first car park and pump up our tyres. Note to self: next time we come here (and there’s a 100% chance that we will want to come back!) make sure the car we hire comes with a compressor. You’ll also be pleased to hear that Mike (who is a policeman) took the piss out of Matt mercilessly as well and when we told the shuttle driver who took us back to poor Naomi that ours was the car under the tree he said, “I know exactly who you are”!!! 😂. I made Matt drive her back to the car park – the ultimate drive of shame!

Matt assisted Mike with re-filling all of the tyres and even gained a tiny bit of revenge when Mike couldn’t open his bonnet so the (essential) compressor had to be connected to Naomi’s battery!

We ended up sitting in the car park, drinking a cold beer and chatting to Mike and Jolene for a couple of hours – one of those joyful serendipitous moments of travelling – until a German lady came along and asked if we could help as they were stuck in the sand!! They clearly hadn’t done any research as their car wasn’t even a 4×4 and they’d got about 30m in! Between us an another car which, coincidentally, came along, we hauled them out and sent them on their way!

By the time we left the sun was starting to set so we saw some of the famous dune shadows:

We also saw a lovely herd of springbok:

There had been a plan to get up early (some people were getting up at 4am 😳) and re-visit the dunes at sunrise but we’d both had more than enough of sand dunes by then and, in any event, Matt’s knees wouldn’t have managed another one so that plan was quickly abandoned!

In a bizarre PS to our time in Sesriem, we heard a loud noise just before going to bed, which Matt thought was a hyena. When we went to the loo in the night one of his flip flops, which he’d left at the bottom of our ladder, was missing. By the morning they had both gone! Not sure if a hyena is, even now, defecating out blue plastic or whether he/she has lined a burrow with them! Photo of prints seen near the back of Naomi with a Swiss Army knife for scale: