Sossusvlei is the most photographed place in southern Africa and it’s not hard to see why. The sweeping red dunes crisp against the blue sky. The salt and clay pans, as white as marble, like dance floors enclosed by walls of sand. The black limbs of long-dead acacias, relics from a time when an ancient river flowed here, then lost its way among the dunes, reach up like strange sculptures to the sky, unable to decompose in this dry place.

Writer Julienne du Toit describes Sossusvlei, located in the Namib-Naukluft National Park, as “the world’s largest sand-pit for adults”. Whether you walk sedately back down the spine of a dune or run whooping like a child down the steepest slope, you can’t help but be captivated by the magic of Sossusvlei.