Another beautiful African sunrise. The camp was very quiet last night by any standards, but the occasional distant rumble of vehicles really made us appreciate how special the past week in Erongo has been. Out there, day or night, we literally heard nothing except the noise we made and that of other animals. A unique thing to experience for such a prolonged period.

We were on the road soon after sunrise, and after a few kilometres of blissful smooth tarmac, we turned onto the gravel tracks that would take us several hundred kilometres, over the mountains to Sestiem – a campsite at the Park Gate that leads in to the heart of the Namib-Naukluft Desert and National Park. 

The drive was varied, bumpy and always interesting. There are a few route options, but we chose to take the C24 to Solitaire, where there is a bakery and petrol station (the last before reaching camp). 

The 320km journey starts starts and finishes on a long straight and flatish section, but the good stuff is in the middle. 

The road crosses over a high pass, (Remhoogte Pass), which is totally navigable, but still very exciting if you’re used to driving nice tarmac roads with white lines down the middle. This section fell to Clare, so I enjoyed the views, while she navigated us steadily up and over!

Along the way we saw a Gemsbok and quite a few baboons on the side of the road.

We stopped for coffee, snack and diesel at Solitaire Roadhouse. It was good to ‘shake out’ and celebrate the ‘crossing of the pass’! There was a TV screen in the bar showing that England had been knocked out of the World Cup again by Argentina, so we got a little taste of the outside world. There were also lots of people suddenly! With Solitaire being the last staging post before Namibia’s most famous and popular attraction (the Namib- Naukluft Desert), it should have been no surprise, but it still felt odd suddenly being among tourists!

The final few hours went without incident. We managed to time our drive to be fairly quite on the roads which was good as each time a car passed from the opposite direction, the cloud of dust that followed it blocked our view like a thick fog, sometimes for an alarmingly long amount of time!

After checking into our pre-booked camp and sorting tickets to get through the park gate early tomorrow morning, we had time for a walk up a nearby dune called Elim.

Clare’s meticulous research has ensured that we are camped tonight between the two park gates, which means that we can access the road into the national park from 06:30 tomorrow morning – an hour before the outer gate opens. Hopefully this will give us a chance of climbing a big sand dune tomorrow before the sunrise…

The sand is so fine grained and bright orange in colour! Elim Dune was a magnificent short walk. The heat in the afternoon is crippling though! It’s just above 30°C but the air is so incredibly dry so it feels hotter. Further into the desert, the humidity is so low that nothing decays!  On the drive back to camp we saw more Gemsbok and a bunch of Ostriches just walking around the scrubland. 

We got a shower (a hot one!) at the campground, which is much more like a European one with communal wash facilities, which feels a real step down in luxury – ha ha! The sun set was still good though as we ate dinner, with a sliver of moon in the sky.