Sands of Time.

Say, do you come here often?

Sesriem, Namibia – We queued along the crease between light and dark as the sun mounted its assault on the sky.

We had arrived early to climb Dune 45 – purported to be the second-tallest dune in the world, behind nearby Dune 7 – in Namib-Naukluft National Park. Looking around later, doubt in that statistic crept in like the shadows that fell onto each of the sand's curves.

Sometimes you have to take these 'facts' with a grain of sand. Still, the dune is 80-metres high, and composed five-million-year-old sand.

Either way, it was hilly beach as far as you could see. The sand was soft and cool on the feet, but each step forward led me to sink anew as we hiked the knife-edge to the summit. Soon, my legs themselves felt like sand. I had become one with the mountain.

The hourglass, filled on the way up, emptied in an instant as I promptly ran straight back down.

As the temperature climbed, we carried-on to Sossuvlei, making our way to a 400,000-year-old dried lake bed now carpeted by bleached clay. The gnarled remains of blackened trees twisted hauntingly from cracks in the ground that mirrored their grotesque – yet beautiful – form.

History, preserved; the hourglass tipped for another day.

Somewhere.

I'm rooting for the defiant tree.

Sesriem, Namibia – An evening cold had dropped into the desert, but the rising sun warns menacingly of its impending bite.

Knowingly, a springbok grazes on the hill, snacking before the heat becomes unbearable.

We spent the night at the Canon Roadhouse campgrounds near Fish River Canyon, which is the world's second-largest canyon at 156 kilometres long, 27 kilometres wide and 550 feet deep. As runner-up, it’s just as grand.

We're also making our way through the world's largest national park – Namib-Naukluft National Park – which will take three days.

Given the apparent absence of people – of life, period, frankly – it seems like it may also be the least-visited. A low fence has lined the entire route, but there hasn't appeared to be much to keep in, or out.

This has been middle-of-nowhere. Like, really middle-of-nowhere.

That has been part of the beauty of this trip thus far: watching the landscape dance between mountains and valleys, swirling from green, to red, to yellow, to brown, to grey; spying round tufts of scrub popping up like heads in the sand; and tracing the scars of desiccated streams. Even the water is too lively to linger long.

We are travelling over millennia of dust that twists and settles temporarily like an anxious nomad, muting the few plants to have the audacity to turn green. Rocks, sand, scrub. Repeat.

Even nowhere is somewhere, and in absence, beauty.