Sand, and Then Water

• The C19, north of Solitaire
• 11:20
• 29°C, clear, hot

Namibia is gravel roads at eighty kilometres an hour with nothing on either side for two hours at a time, and the only thing that changes is the colour of the grit. We passed four vehicles between Solitaire and the dunes. My brother-in-law drove and I sat with the camera in my lap on the off chance, which is the correct posture and also useless.

• Dune 45, Sossusvlei
• 07:05
• 12°C, clear, cold before eight

The dunes at Sossusvlei run north-south so at sunrise one face is lit and the other is not, and the line between them is a single knife edge you could balance a coin on. This is why everybody photographs the same dune at the same time. I climbed a third of the way up it, sat down, and used a long lens on the ridge rather than a wide one on the whole thing.

• The dune valley, Sossusvlei
• 09:25
• 26°C, clear

An oryx came out of the dune valley and walked diagonally across the face at a distance I would guess at three hundred metres, and it went from being a dune to being a very large dune with an animal on it. They do not drink; they get water out of what they eat and let their own body temperature run up past forty. I have thought about that fact more than the photograph.

• Okaukuejo waterhole, Etosha
• 15:10
• 33°C, hot, hard light

Zebras drink in a rank with their heads down and their ears going constantly, and the ones on the ends do almost no drinking at all. They came in three times in the afternoon and turned and left twice before anything touched the water. The light on white stone at that hour is a nightmare, so I converted it and stopped fighting.

• A pan east of Halali, Etosha
• 17:25
• 28°C, dust in the air

Late afternoon at a smaller pan east of the camp, with the light going orange through the dust that everything kicks up on the way in. Oryx have that face marking that makes them look permanently formal. These two came, drank for under a minute, and left, and neither of them looked at the vehicle once.

• The southern edge of Etosha Pan
• 09:50
• 30°C, haze off the pan

Etosha is a salt pan a hundred and thirty kilometres across that has been dry for most of two million years, and along its southern edge the water comes up in springs, so every animal in the park is on one white line. Zebra, wildebeest, springbok, giraffe, all in the same frame at four hundred metres, all doing nothing.