the North Rim attracts the sort of visitors inclined to linger

The sand beneath our feet is powdery, as soft as talcum. Weather & water have crushed it. There's no rocks & no trees on the dunes' steep slopes, scattered patches of grass. The night winds & dry sand prevent the rest. There's only the fresh footprints of the few people leading the way up the sharp, narrow crest of the dune. The slopes fall away a step on either side.
They must cease to safely gaze across the barren valley at the silhouetted outlines of more towering dunes, set against the now dark but slowly lightening sky. It is difficult in the early morning to see the color. But as the sun slowly rises, for a few more minutes invisible below the horizon, the dunes' rich deep orange-red colors start to emerge.

One dune called "Big Daddy" rises 380 meters, or about a quarter-mile, from its base, soaring above the hardscrabble scrub-brush & acacia-dotted landscape of western Namibia's Namib-Naukluft desert. This area, known as Sossusvlei, is remote, about 300 kilometers (186 miles) south-southwest of the capital, Windhoek, & an equal distance southeast from Walvis Bay. But it is worth the long desert drive. The dunes at Sossusvlei are a natural wonder of the world.


The reason they, and so lots of others, have come here is for the moment minutes away, when the sun will suddenly blast above the fringe of the parched earth, revealing a landscape that is directly starkly stunning, sensationally dramatic and incredibly rare.
Geologists will tell you that Namibia's dunes are built and formed by wind and carved by water. They are believed to be 60 million to 80 million years elderly, made of sand pushed inland over the eons from the coast by Atlantic Ocean winds that sweep onshore 80 kilometers to the west.