The lake in the desert

Got up really early today (at five). Why? Because you're supposed to see the dunes of the Namib at sunrise. Sunrise is at about 6.30 here at the moment, but I still had to drive around 60 km to the park entrance (gravel road). So I did what I wasn't supposed to do: drive at night. The two main reasons why you aren't supposed to drive at night in Namibia: when it's dark you don't see the dangerous parts of the street, and there are more animals around at night. Good thing was that it wasn't really dark to begin with. The moon lit up the whole area (so much for trying to get some photos of the stars at night), and twilight was starting pretty soon. As for the animal, so far it was the only time I was quite glad not to see a lot of them. Except for one Oryx Antilope, which passed the street not too far, but also not too close. But is was a really beautiful one, and I didn't know before how big they are. I reached the park entrance shortly before sunrise, and the first time since I've been here, there was a traffic jam. It's one if the main attractions, and everybody needs to buy a permit to get in. When I finally got mine, the sun was already up, so I chose not to go to the main dunes at the enf of the park right away like everybody else (another 60 km), but to stop shortly after the entrance at the first dune, to get at least some nice pics in the morning light. Then I followed to rest to the end of the normal road to the 2WD parking. Although I do have a 4WD car, I rather took the shuttle, I didn't want to get stuck in the deep sand there (as several others did, as I saw later). I then went into the Dead Vlei, a valley in between several large dunes of red sand, in which lots of old dead tree can be found. Great place for playing around with the camera. Hoped on the next shuttle to take me to the end, to the point where everybody rushes to in the morning, to Sossusvlei. By the time I managed to get there, most people had already climbed their dune and left again. Still trying to decide if I should try to climb one of the dunes (walking in the sand was already quite difficult), I realised that there was water in the vlei (valley). A huge lake, with lots and lots of birds (typical for water, not desert), in the middle if all the dunes in the desert. Apparently this happens about every ten years only. This year was even more special, since it wasn't the river getting more water and finally reaching the vlei, but it was only one night's rain last summer (our winter), which then came down into this vlei and created the lake. Would be interesting to see how long it will last. Therefore ended up walking around the lake instead of climbing a dune, the view of the the dunes mirroring in the water was too amazing.