Deadvlei

Interesting facts

The name means dead marsh, joining the English word dead with the Afrikaans vlei, a lake or marsh; it is often wrongly translated as dead valley.

The dead trees are camel thorns, Vachellia erioloba, and although they look petrified, they are still ordinary wood rather than stone.

Besides Hollywood productions, the Indian films Ghajini and Ayan were partly filmed among the dead trees of Deadvlei.

The deep red of the surrounding dunes comes from iron oxide coating the sand grains, which grows stronger as the sand ages.

The Tsauchab river never reaches the ocean: it ends in this dune-locked basin, which is why the pans are called dead-end marshes.

Rainfall in the area averages only about 104 millimetres a year, and the few surviving plants rely largely on moisture from morning mist.

The giant dunes around the pan do not rest on bare ground but on an older terrace of sandstone.

Why it is worth it

Deadvlei is a white clay pan enclosed by some of the highest dunes on Earth, deep in the Namib Desert of western Namibia, and it holds one of the most unearthly scenes on the planet. On its cracked, bone-pale floor stand the blackened skeletons of camel thorn trees, their branches twisted against a backdrop of rust-orange sand and an intensely blue sky. The colours are so pure and the shadows so sharp that photographs of the place are often mistaken for paintings, and it has served as an otherworldly backdrop in films including The Cell and The Fall.

The trees tell the history of the pan. The Tsauchab river once flooded this hollow often enough to leave shallow pools, and camel thorns took root in the moist ground. When the climate grew drier, the advancing dunes cut the river off, the water stopped coming and the trees died, an estimated six to seven centuries ago. They have not decayed since: the air is so dry that the wood never rotted, and the sun has scorched it nearly black. Today only hardy desert plants such as the nara melon and salsola survive around the edges.

The dunes that wall in the pan reach extraordinary heights; the tallest, nicknamed Big Daddy, averages around 350 metres and looms directly over the white floor and the dead trees. The light is the reason to come early or late: at sunrise the dunes glow red on one side and lie in deep shadow on the other, and the contrast with the white pan is at its strongest. Deadvlei lies a short distance from the larger and better-known Sossusvlei pan, in the Namib-Naukluft National Park, and the two are usually visited together.

Getting there

Deadvlei is reached from the park gate at Sesriem along a road of about 60 km through the dune valley to the two-wheel-drive car park; the last 5 km of deep sand are passable only by four-wheel drive or by the shuttle that runs from the car park, and from the four-wheel-drive car park it is a walk of about 1 km over sand to the pan. There is no sizeable town nearby: Lüderitz is more than 200 km away in a straight line, and the nearest airport is Walvis Bay (WVB), about 208 km away.

From the encyclopaedia

Deadvlei is a white clay pan located near the more famous salt pan of Sossusvlei, in a valley between the dunes in the Namib-Naukluft Park in Namibia. Also written DeadVlei or Dead Vlei, its name means "dead marsh". Its Afrikaans name is Dooie Vlei. Many Internet references erroneously translate its name as "dead valley"; a vlei is not a valley. Nor is the site a valley; the pan is a desiccated vlei.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Deadvlei

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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From the encyclopaedia