I have never been anywhere in the world quite like Namibia – or the Namib Desert. The Namib Desert between Sossusvlei and the coast is 200kms wide (125 miles), and actually stretches north / south about 2,000kms (1,250 miles) covering parts of South Africa, Namibia and Angola. Much of the desert is this super vibrant red sand due to the minerals and elements in the sand, which makes for quite interesting color contrasts. We stayed at the Kulala Lodge where they offer various activities – including a guided hike up a few of the sand dunes.

One of the very best experiences we had was to climb the Big Daddy Dune. The dune itself is approximately 325 meters tall (even though we were told during our climb that it was 400 meters tall), and it took us about 2 hours to climb up, and we went straight down the face of the dune into Deadvlei, taking approximately 10 minutes.  We left the lodge around 7 AM and started climbing the dune by around 8 AM.  We were at the top by 10 AM, and couldn’t be happier – I estimate it was already over 35C / 100F by 10 AM.

Sony A7R II | FE 70-200mm F4 | 104 mm | f/20 | 1/1000th | ISO4000

A little something that I would have never known – it’s easier to walk over sand where someone else has already walked before.  Our guide was smart enough to let us take our time getting to the dune so that a few other groups went before us.  If you walk on someone else’s footprints, the sand is actually a bit more solid and it takes less effort to walk.  Pro tip.

A few years back, my father-in-law came down to visit us in Australia.  Now, he doesn’t travel a ton, so the trip down from the middle of America to Australia was a long trek for him to do.  My missus (not knowing at the time how long we were actually going to be in Australia) predicted that this was the only time that he would ever set foot here, so she wanted to make it worth his trip.  He took a solo trip up to Queensland and took a day trip out to snorkel over the Great Barrier Reef while we worked.  Then we all took a flight down to Adelaide, took the ferry boat over to Kangaroo Island where we stayed for a few days.  Then we popped up to the Barossa Valley for a couple of days right around Christmas, then took the long route to drive from the Barossa to Melbourne, where we spent New Years Eve.  Now, if you do the math, in his relatively short trip down to Australia, he visited 4 of the 9 States and Territories in one shot!!!

In any event, on our week long drive between basically Adelaide and Melbs, we hit the south coast for the Great Ocean Road, and stopped for an hour or so at the Twelve Apostles.  Australia is full of sandstone, but these particular formations are spectacular in that they are slowly being eroded by the waves of the Great Southern Ocean, and at some point in the future will actually cease to exist.

Canon 7D | Canon EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 | 35mm | f/8.0 | 1/750th | ISO100