Phew a very early start this morning - up and on the truck by 5:15am, thankfully we didn't have to pack up our tents beforehand this morning.
We're off to climb Dune 45 to watch the sunrise, a 45 minute drive later and we're at the bottom of the dune with the top approx 150 meters above us - no problems (or so we thought). I knew I should have put in more hours at the gym (or even some hours might have been helpful) climbing that dune was like being on a stair climber, my legs were going a mile a minute but I wasn't getting anywhere!
Nick went up much better than I did but we made it in the end and got to sit and wat the sun rise over the sand dunes and watch all the colours change as the sand lit up.
Coming down was much easier but I'm sure we brought down half the sand dune in our shoes as well.

George, Simon and Ben had french toast waiting for us at the bottom so we feasted on that and then headed for Sossusvlei.
In Sossusvlei we walked through the desert to see the Dead Vlei - a dried up lake where the river used to run through, there were dead trees there that had been petrified by the sun and were 900-1000 years old. From there we headed across to the Live Vlei where the trees are still green and only 400-500 years old.
We spotted an African Eagle Owl in one of the trees - he was huge but very cool.

We headed back to camp for a quick shower, packed up the tents and had lunch before heading off on the truck again.

We had a bit of rain today at lunch and as we were driving - who would have thought it was possible in a desert!

We stopped briefly in Solataire, a tiny wee town (smaller than Matawai), they had a blackboard where they had recorded the monthly rainfall for this year as well as previous years rainfall - 2011 is obviously a wet year for them as they only had 135mm of rain in all of 2010 but they had 122mm in Jan this year. I think they had another 100mm while we were there as the heavens opened and it poured down for about 10 minutes.

We drove through Naukluft National Park and stopped about an hour from Swakopmund for our first night of bush camping - no camp ground, no facilities.
We pitched the tents and helped set up the kitchen in a cave and started our camp fire. It was a really lovely camp site but the ground was all quartz so pretty hard for sleeping on, not that it stopped us getting sleep though.