Vlei is pronounced flay and today we went to a vlei, two vleis to be exact. Their names were Sossusvlei and Deadvlei. Since the park is a long ways away from where we are staying now, we left early in the morning to get to the park when the gates open so that we could do the dunes while it was still cool outside. When we got into the park, bought our permits and drove to the parking lot at the end of the tar road, we started walking the five kilometers to the vleis.

At first we walked along the road, moving to the side when the shuttles went by. One might ask why we didn’t us the shuttle, and the answer is because my father wanted to walk, which was fine by me. About a kilometer in, we started walking away from the main road and towards some dunes that looked big. We walked towards those and then climbed them, only to see that there were still a lot more dunes to go across. This went on for some time before we finally got to the vlei, which means marsh in Afrikaans. The first one, Sossusvlei, was, of course, dry, and we walked across it to the parking lot. From the parking lot, we went to the road and over to Deadvlei. The walk was two kilometers, but we made it. On the other side of the vlei, there were little black spots moving up a big dune. When Eryn identified those as people, we realized just how big those dunes were.

That’s all for now, Folks!