Exploring Sossusvlei's natural landmarks

Trees, rivers, mountains, open spaces… we know what these do for the brain. Nature creates awe like nothing else can. It gives you a much-needed dose of perspective. But what of the age of a natural landmark? Can we feel the difference between a 100-year-old tree and one three times its age? Can we, at least subconsciously, grasp the gravity of history? 

After travelling through the Namib Desert, the only answer I can give is a resounding ‘yes’. The beauty of a natural landmark is in the stories it tells. They help us see in deep time – a geological and evolutionary scale. Time measured in epochs and millennia, rather than days or decades.  

The journalist Don Pinnock, writing on deep time and Cape Town’s Table Mountain, said it well: ‘It shows us that species rise and fall. Oceans open and close. Mountains appear and disappear. And yet, amid all this relentless planetary churn, life persists. Earth endures.’ 

When visiting a place like Wilderness Kulala Desert Lodge, you may not contemplate the age of the landforms around you. But I’d argue you feel them, as I did, undeniably – tuning in to some intangible frequency that only nature’s oldest artifacts can emit. 

Set in the private Kulala Wilderness Reserve in the south of the Namib Desert, the lodge looks out to one of Namibia’s most famous places, the Namib Sand Sea, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in the Namib-Naukluft National Park. Made up of ancient sands dating back 30 million years, with ‘younger’ grains of about 5 million years old, these burnt sienna dunes curve across the eastern horizon of the lodge, with the Naukluft mountain’s jagged peaks breaking into the skyline. 

In the west, the reserve is framed by the flat-topped Tsaris mountain range, formed with the rifts of the Great Escarpment over 400 million years ago. 

The Namib Desert is, in and of itself, a natural wonder; a 55-million-year-old landscape and the only desert on Earth that depends on coastal fog for its survival. 

Amongst the oryx, the springbok, the black-backed jackals, and the host of small desert-adapted creatures here, are the markers of time immemorial: mountains, valleys, dunes, and canyons that came into being in the planet’s unfathomably storied past.  

In the Sand Sea, tall reddish dunes crest and fall like waves. The more smouldering the shade, the older the dune; a fact that’s hard to comprehend in this age-old desert. Standing alone on a dune with our guide, Mathew Movirongo, we look out over the sand undulating through the park. A belt of life sprouts along the dry Tsauchab riverbed beneath us, with touches of mustard bushes, ‘ostrich salad’ succulents, and surprisingly green acacias. Underfoot, the imprints of jackals, tenebrionid beetles and Cape hares press into the soft sand.

Away from the other tourists gathering in the park, we’re able to soak up the landscape in private. Mathew allows us to take it all in before drawing a map of Namibia in the sand. He describes how the dunes were formed, tracking the journey of sand and minerals from South Africa’s Orange River, into the Atlantic Ocean, and their eventual washing up on the coast before being blown inland. 

He lays out the facts plainly, but the impression they leave could not be more profound. One wonders: How long did the sand take to travel across country and ocean to be here? How many years, decades or longer did it take to bake each grain into the colour of amber? If these red sands underfoot, glittering with specks of silica, are a few million years old, how old then must the base sands be? What trees, roots, and relics could be buried underneath? 

While Sossusvlei has become the name for this southern region of the Namib, it’s also the name of the salt and clay pan around which the red dunes have formed. This ancient pan exists because of the silting of the Tsauchab River, which left behind dry pools of stone white that appear so alien from above. 

The indigenous Nama people saw the river’s abrupt end at the dunes, and combined the Nama word ‘Sossus’ meaning dead-end, with the Dutch and Afrikaans word ‘vlei’ meaning marsh. This pan fills with water in the rare years of heavy rainfall, but for most of its life it’s baked dry and cracked into a million pieces, like wood shavings scattered along the sand.

After an unprecedented amount of rainfall this year, the Tsauchab flowed strongly in April. It dried up quickly, as the Namib’s ephemeral rivers do, but some water remained, creating islands out of acacia trees and mirroring the surrounds. It’s an intriguing marriage of elements and colours: the camel colour of sand against the white reflective light off the water.

Bewildered by the presence of water in a desert, we walk towards the base of the Big Daddy dune, which looms tall and glows bronze compared to the younger yellow sands around it.  

As we ascend Big Daddy – a massive star dune standing about 320 meters high – the contrast of the water against its orange-red ridges becomes increasingly stark. Shadows scoop and carve into the sand, then swoop down into the salt pan of Deadvlei, until eventually there appear to be four separate worlds behind us: water, sand, shadow and clay. Streaks of dead plant material create their own shadows on the distant slopes, while beneath us, the wind has blown countless creases into the dune.

As we climb higher, the Naukluft mountains appear hazy and purple from afar, and the star dunes – shaped by winds rushing at them from all directions – ripple across the panorama. Finally at the dune’s peak, the immensity of the sand and the effect of gravity meet, causing the grains to move almost exactly like liquid – an effect best experienced as you run down Big Daddy. With each footstep, the sands cascade out from under you, wave upon wave crashing over themselves like sea foam. 

An unusual wub sounds from the dune as you pluck each ankle out of the sand; air pressure bursting out from the nearest depths. Along with these sounds and the trickle of sands, there is laughter erupting from the other travellers. Running full tilt down a sand dune has a way of waking your inner child. 

Deadvlei’s deep cracks are etched into the earth like an elephantine skin. The pan is impossibly light against the red of the dunes and the charcoal of petrified trees, while surprisingly green living trees skirt the pan’s edges. 

The ‘Valley of Death’ could not be more alive at midday, with happy tourists, self-satisfied after a tough climb, meandering through the trees and taking photographs. 

But amidst all this energy and excitement is the fact of the place: these dead camelthorn trees are at least 900 years old, their roots kept standing by frozen-in-time clay, the dry climate refusing them a natural death. 

To think how this landscape must have changed as they stood still… dunes pushing further inland with time, new younger sands piling on with the years, the slow reddening of Big Daddy with each sunrise and sunset…

Carved by the Tsauchab River’s sporadic flow over millions of years, Sesriem is a 30 metre deep canyon filled with caves, crevices and a rockface contoured by moving water. Tree roots turn at sudden right angles in the ground showing their search for water in years of drought, small pools fill unexpectedly in hidden basins, and baboons bark and yak from the caves when the tourists empty out. 

Standing at the precipice above, it seems like nothing more than a crack in the earth. But from the depths, one feels the strangeness of standing in a river’s shadow – the same river that sliced its way down the Naukluft mountains, travelling 150 km across gravel plains and canyon, to end abruptly in the pans of Sossusvlei.  

Looking out over the reserve at sunset, we can name the distant mountain ranges, the dunes behind us, and the desert we find ourselves in. But the mountain we stand on has no name, and the fairy circles dotting the far-reaching plains remain a mystery. In another few million years, the red dunes may shift even further. The Tsauchab may reach the Atlantic again. Or, a more likely guess, none of this will be recognisable at all. For some reason, looking out at these vestiges of past ages, contemplating that impermanence is deeply, deeply comforting.