Deadvlei is a white clay pan with about a hundred dead trees standing on it, and they have been dead for six or seven hundred years. The camel thorns have not fallen and have not rotted. There is not enough moisture in the air for wood to decay here, so the sun has simply scorched the trunks coal-black and left them where they grew. They stand with branches intact, brittle as charcoal, on a floor cracked into hard plates. The name mixes English and Afrikaans and means dead marsh, which is exactly what it was. The Tsauchab River used to flood this hollow, and then the dunes closed the route in. What is left is one of the most graphic scenes in Africa: bone-white clay, black trees, apricot dunes rising behind, hard blue sky above. Big Daddy, one of the tallest dunes anywhere at around 325 metres, stands directly over the pan.
Arrive at first light. As the sun crests the dune, one face glows like an ember while the other holds deep purple shadow, and the black trees throw long sharp lines across the pale floor. Underfoot the dried mud crunches, and the silence is complete apart from wind. Stand in the middle and the horizon stacks into clean bands of orange, white and blue. By mid-morning the sun is overhead, the shadows are gone, and the whole scene flattens. Getting here takes effort: from the Sesriem gate a track runs about sixty kilometres to the edge of the sand, and the last stretch is too soft for ordinary cars. Staying inside the gate is the only way to be walking onto the pan before the day-visitor convoy arrives. If your legs are willing, climb Big Daddy for the whole pan laid out below, then run straight back down its face into the trees.