Climbing Big Daddy and the Most Photographed Dune on Earth | Day 3

"Tourists are obsessed with Dune 45," Marius said, hunched over the bonnet of the Defender, extinguishing his cigarette on the heel of his boot. He was never one for stubbing a half-smoked cigarette and keeping it for later. When it was time to leave the cigarette was dispensed with and filed away in an empty Coke bottle he kept down the side of his seat. The bottle would be near full by the end of the day's drive.

"But there are much fewer footprints on Dune 40, let's go there."

Dune 45 is situated 45km past Sesriem on the road to Sossusvlei, the land of the iconic red sand dunes of the Namib. Sossusvlei is the pan (valley floor) where Marius parked up.

One of the tourists doing the self-drives had come undone, marooned in the dunes with their Defender spitting and churning the wheels unable to free itself from the claws of the desert floor. The tourists that do the self-drive get very little sympathy from the guides. "They made their bed, they lie in it," Marius scoured unsympathetically as we drove by.

After a box-tick stop off at Dune 40 and Dune 45 we made our way to Big Daddy, the tallest sand dune in the Sossusvlei area at just over a 1000 feet tall, located in the Namib-Naukluft Park.

"You're not wanting to climb that are you?" Marius asked rhetorically. "We'll climb it," the wife said without hesitation.

That seemed to irritate Marius who would later be quite irascible for the rest of the day. Eventually I discovered that our drive destination for the day would be in Swakopmund, his home town, approximately 5 hours drive. I presume he just wanted to get home in time for dinner. "We're now running out of time and will be late," he would repeat on the drive, especially after an hour's long lunch break in the desert oasis town of Solitaire.

"I'm sorry if we're adding wrinkles to the day, but we had to have lunch Marius," I said trying to keep the mood light and neither the wife nor I were impressed that we felt the need to justify ourselves. "The bakery would have been quicker."

"Stop apologizing," the wife ordered, in a slightly hushed but loud enough tone that told everyone in the car that we in fact will be late for nothing. There are no dinner commitments. The hotels do not have a curfew, and Marius is being paid handsomely for his time which is not (to our knowledge) restricted to 9-5.

In contrast to what the internet tells you, it takes the best part of two hours to climb Big Daddy, notwithstanding a couple of obligatory stop offs across the Deadvlei pan where corpses of trapped dead acacia trees appear like charred remains in a sacred ice rink.

It's worth noting the toilets on site are borderline wartime despicable. I'm not sure how much UNESCO is investing into the local amenities, but it is in desperate need of review.

One other stop was the Sesriem Canyon, 30m deep, 1k long gorge slashed into the earth by the Tsauchab river millions of years ago. A sight to see and to take note, but we had no desire to explore. It was a long four hour drive to Swakopmund, which we did largely in silence.