The Incredible Namib Desert | Moon Landscapes & Strange Plants | Walvis Bay, Namibia

This excursion took us into the Namib Desert from the port of Walvis Bay. We saw thousands of flamingos at Walvis Bay before heading into the desert.

Our first stop was at Namib-Naukluft National Park, a vast national park that is distinguished by massive sand dunes and otherworldly terrain during a tour of a remarkable desert environment. We drove around 30-minutes to Dune 7, the region’s largest sand dune. We then drove through Namib-Naukluft National Park, which includes part of the Namib Desert and is the country’s largest nature preserve, and saw sand dunes, whose colors vary due to the iron in the sand oxidizing to a darker shade as the dunes age.

In spite of the seemingly harsh conditions, flora and fauna thrive here, such as the welwitschia, which resembles wilted lettuce and produces only two leaves in its up to 500-year lifetime. We saw the Moon Landscape, a vastly eroded valley that is reminiscent of the lunar surface. This environment appears to be barren, it supports a complex ecosystem of lichens and shrubs subsisting on the occasional moisture provided by sea fog that rolls in from as far as 20 miles away. A guide demonstrated how the black dead-looking lichen turns green with water. We drove through a dry riverbed in the middle of the moon landscape that flows around every 10 years but still has trees and shrubs. We stopped for lunch.

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