On Top of the World

This is a post about our last weekend with our professors and the two non-education majors. We spent our last weekend together as a group of 12 in Namib Desert in an area called Sossusvlei. We actually camped in the Namib Desert - tents, sleeping bags, and the whole things. Can you believe it? Me, camping? To be fare it was a camp ground, so there definitely were bathrooms, a pool, and restaurant/store. It was actually a very nice and relaxing weekend. But oh lord could you imagine how much sand there was everywhere!

 Anyways, the absolutely best part about the weekend was climbing the TALLEST SAND DUNE IN THE WORLD! Well, the climbing was not the most fun but reaching the top and seeing down below was awesome. Climbing a dune is so hard and exhausting and it felt that you were never making a progress. It probably took about two hours to reach the top, but reaching the top of the dune and seeing down below is almost an indescribable experience. It is breath taking and the pictures do not do it justice. Once we made it to the top, we just sat there for about thirty minutes taking it all in. The entire class made it up to the top while our professors watched from 380 meters below. They honestly looked like small moving specs down below. We were so high we couldn't even make them out!

I’m not sure what was more fun, sitting on the top of the dune and looking down or sprinting down the dune?! Megan, Mitch, and I just started sprinting down the dune towards our professors. It seem like it took ages to get to them. Sometime we would be going so fast that we would fall and snowball down. Sometimes we would sprint and leap into the air. It felt like flying. I can’t get over how cool spending the morning on the dune was. Once we made it down to our professors, we were on this dried up pan called Deadvlei, which the land has cracks on it that made it look like cobbled-stones. Deadvlei means “dead valley” which is fitting because it is this piece of the land in between sand dunes that has nothing but thousand year old dead trees. There is something ominous but beautiful about this area. 

On our way home from this weekend trip, we got to walk down a canyon! It was actually so cool and beautiful!! It just felt like we were really in nature being down there and looking up to see the caves in the canyon. Also on our way home we crossed the Topic of Capricorn!!! How cool is that? This weekend was so much fun and filled with a lot of “once in a lifetime” activities!