After a nice two night stay at our lodge and waking up to the view from my room’s front porch as shown in the pictures below (there were some animals out there the prior evening), it was time to head to the local airport for our flight over the dunes.

The plane was a nice small job which allowed us to fly fairly low. A really neat feature of this one, being the photographer that I am, was a cutout in one of the side windows with a fold out piece which allowed me to stick my camera lens out through the window for direct photos without any window and reflections - very, very nice as you can see in the results!

Another unusual thing about this airport was that the runway was made up of bricks and not concrete or asphalt. Clearly no large planes ever landed or took off there!

Many of the mountains before we entered the dunes are made up of rugged dark stone - basically igneous. Currently there are no active volcanoes in the area but in the past it was a fairly active.

The flight started out following the same road we were on the day before along the Tsauchab River heading into the Namib Desert dunes. There was some water at the start of the flight but it rapidly disappeared into the ground as we flew above it.

One of the famous things about these dunes is their rich red coloration which is from rusting iron oxide. You can also see a lot of white sections in low areas along their edges and between them. These were the dry pans that I previously mentioned. There were also a fair amount of shrubs and small trees along the drying up river bed and in some of the low white clay areas.

As we approached the coastline, the dunes started flattening out and the red coloration started fading out to a yellowish/gray tint.