Waking up with the sunrise we start our journey to the Namib Desert. The Namib Desert is said to be among the oldest deserts in the world with an age of 43 million years. It is in its present form since two million years. The orange colored sand dunes are the highest in the world and they can be up to 300 to 400 meters. Each of the dunes in the desert is numerized. The Namib is a coastal desert and it extends for an area of 2000km along the Atlantic coast of the African continent. The Namib Desert is uninhabited.

The Oryx, also known as the gemsbok is a common sight in the Namibian Desert thanks to its incredible adaptability to the desert conditions of intensive heat and lack of water. The Oryx has a special cooling system around its nose which is cooling down the blood temperature even if the outside temperature is very hot. They can survive in the desert with very little water supply and they just get the water mostly from the plants they eat.

The dune that we are going to climb up is the most popular one : Dune 45.

Vegetation in the Namibian Desert…

Finally we arrive at the top of the dune with our guide.

This is the 360 degree view from the top of the Dune 45. An endless impressive view of hundreds of kilometers of sand and rocks…

We made it!

So we deserved a cold and nice champagne as an award for climbing up in the red desert. What a great feeling!

Now we are off to the rest of our trip with the jeeps that are waiting for us.

Driving with the jeeps through the landscape is quite difficult because the sand roads are not easy to overcome. Some of the cars even get stuck in the sandbanks.

We enjoy the deep blue of the sky and the orange red of the sand.

Finally we are giving a break and sitting under the shadows of the few trees. Rising our heads we recognize an owl just above us and the big bird nests which can host hundreds of birds at the same time.

It was a unique and adventurous experience that we are happy to still keep in our minds. Most impressive was the gigantic emptiness in that huge colorful space that endures life for millions of years.