Safari to Sossusvlei

some of the largest sand dunes in the world

The Sossusvlei area is home to the enormous red sand-dunes for which Namibia is so renowned.

These incredible landscapes can easily be visited by vehicle, there is a sealed road leading into the valley from the park entrance at Sesriem, with only the last few kilometres being on sand.

The priority, especially for photographers, is usually to get into these dunes for first light, when the sand really comes to life.

Guest accommodation is around twenty lodges, in a very wide range of sizes and specifications.

Although Sossusvlei is very impressive and fun to visit, it’s important to appreciate that this is one of the two most touristy areas of Namibia (the other being Etosha) and it can get quite busy and traffic avoidance measures should be employed.

Other activities in the area include some excellent opportunities for ballooning, quad-biking and horse-riding.

Sossusvlei is a very popular location and tends to feature in a very high proportion of first time visits to Namibia.

The usual stay duration is 2-4 nights.

Seasonality

The climate in Sossusvlei is relatively stable and the area can be visited year round, although the most popular period is the long Apr-Dec dry season.

Getting there

There are three main ways to get around Namibia and visit Sossusvlei …

Self-drive

The first option is to self-drive, which is reasonably safe and easy to do. The upside is that it is by far the lowest cost way to get around. The downside is that, for safety reasons, you are obliged to stick to a relatively limited network of main roads locations.

Around 90% of the visitors to the Sossusvlei area arrive by self-drive, so the whole area is designed to cater for this kind of traffic.

Flying safari

The second option is to travel around by light aircraft. This is both a great deal easier and enables you to access some wonderfully remote locations. The downside is that it’s much more expensive, as much as three times the price of self-drive.

Less than 10% of guests into Sossusvlei arrive by light aircraft, almost all of whom stay on the upmarket Kulala Concession, which has an airstrip and is able to offer all the various guided activities and other services.

Guided overland expedition

The third option is guided overland expedition, which enables you to really explore the truly wild and wonderful parts of the country. The downsides are that this can be quite an arduous way to travel and can become quite costly.

Sossusvlei is virtually never included in this kind of trip, the overland guides prefer to head out to more remote areas, where they can be free to conduct their safari as they please.

Combinations

Many of the very best trips to Namibia combine two or three of these ways of travelling around.

Where to stay

Guest accommodation in Sossusvlei is around twenty lodges, in a very wide range of sizes and specifications.

The area experiences relatively high visitor traffic, especially during the main holiday seasons Jun-Sep and Dec-Jan.

Although there’s rarely more than around 400 to 500 people visiting the area on any given day, unfortunately the desire to get into the dunes in time for first light means that almost everyone gets snagged in the bottle neck at Sesriem Gate, followed by a vehicle procession down to Sossusvlei.

The main way to avoid this mess is to stay in one of the lodges which have priority access into the national park.

The first option is to stay at Sossus Dune Lodge, which is a famously unreliable park authority property located inside the reserve and therefore able to avoid the gate and get a jump on the traffic.

A much higher quality option is to stay at either Kulala Desert Lodge or Little Kulala Lodge, both of which are able to take advantage of a private gate into the reserve, which usually enables them to get ahead of the main flow of traffic.

The bottom line is that you will always encounter other people in this area, but if you can get to Deadvlei first, then that’s a big win.

a very popular stop in first time visits to Namibia