Deadvlei

Where it sits. Deadvlei is a white clay pan in the Namib-Naukluft Park, roughly two kilometres from the better-known Sossusvlei and about four kilometres on foot from the point where the tar road ends. It lies in a hollow enclosed by some of the highest dunes on earth: Big Daddy rises about 325 metres on the southern side, facing another giant known as Big Mama, and the pan sits on a sandstone terrace between them. The scale is difficult to read until people appear on the dune crest as a line of specks. There is no shade anywhere in the basin and no water; the nearest facilities are at the Sesriem gate, 65 kilometres away.

How it formed. The Tsauchab river drains inland from the Naukluft mountains into an endorheic basin with no outlet to the sea. After heavy rains it once reached this hollow and flooded it, and the standing water allowed camel thorn trees — Vachellia erioloba — to establish and grow to full size. Then the dunes advanced and blocked the river's course, the pools stopped coming, and the trees died. They are generally reckoned to have died some 600 to 700 years ago. What is left is not a petrified forest, a label applied to the site constantly and wrongly: the trunks are simply desiccated wood, blackened by six centuries of sun, standing because the air is far too dry for the fungi and insects that would normally break them down. Around them the pan floor has dried to a crust of pale, salt-rich clay that cracks into plates.

What makes the picture. Four flat bands of colour stack up with almost no gradation between them: the white pan, the black trunks, the orange dune wall and the blue sky. The dune colour comes from iron oxide on the sand grains, and it deepens with the age of the dune, so the older ranges inland read as deep rust while the younger coastal dunes are pale. The pan is at its best in the first hour after sunrise, when the eastern dune faces are still in shadow, the crest lines are lit, and the low sun throws the trees' shadows across the clay in long parallel lines. In the last hour of the day the pan holds reflected orange light off the western dune. Between about ten and four the light is overhead and flat and the heat is severe.

On screen — and what was not shot here. Deadvlei and the Sossusvlei dunes are among the most photographed landscapes in Africa and appear routinely in advertising, album artwork, fashion editorials and stills libraries; they have also served as shorthand for alien or post-human worlds in commercial and short-form work. The persistent error worth correcting is the attribution of Mad Max: Fury Road to Sossusvlei. That production worked in the coastal Namib in and around the Dorob National Park near Swakopmund, some 350 kilometres north, on grey gravel plains and low coastal dunes — a completely different landscape from the red sand seas here. Commercial filming and stills work inside the park require a permit from Namibia Wildlife Resorts, and drones are prohibited, which is why almost every aerial image of the pan is shot from a light aircraft or a balloon.

Getting there and walking in. Access is through the Sesriem gate, where a 60-kilometre tarmac road — one of the few metalled non-urban roads in Namibia, built in the early 2000s — runs to the "2x4 parking". The last stretch to Sossusvlei is deep sand needing four-wheel drive or the park shuttle, and from the shuttle stop it is a walk of about 1.1 kilometres over a dune saddle into the Deadvlei basin, marked with posts and much harder in soft sand than the distance suggests. Guests staying inside the gate at the park's own campsite and lodge can enter at sunrise, an hour before the outer gate opens, which is the whole reason to pay for a bed inside. Climbing Big Daddy takes 1.5 to 2 hours up the ridge and about ten minutes to run down the slip face into the pan.

Timing and conditions. May to September gives cool days and cold nights, with dawn temperatures near freezing in June and July. December to February exceeds 40 °C by mid-morning and makes the walk genuinely dangerous without two or more litres of water per person. Rare rain between February and April can flood the pans, a sight most Namibians have never seen. Dune 45, at kilometre 45 on the access road, is the fallback sunrise climb for anyone short of time, and the Sesriem Canyon near the gate fills the harsh middle of the day.