Wolwedans Dune Lodge, Namibia - hotel review

As the bookies tip Namibia to be Harry and Meghan’s honeymoon spot, Rose Gamble finds out what it offers

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After negotiating a shadowy pass between two expansive orange dunes, we roll out into a valley. Its steep walls are pockmarked with thousands of circles imprinted in the sand. They glint in the harsh desert sunlight like innumerable unblinking eyes. 

Known as fairy circles, these sandy halos freckle a strip of land on the edge of the Namib Desert stretching 1,120 miles from Angola to the north-western cape province of South Africa. Here, in the red sands of the NamibRand Nature Reserve in south-west Namibia, jav dvd they are at their most abundant.

Curiously, despite decades of research, scientists remain baffled by what causes them. I ask Tabita, our guide, for her theory. “I think it is God,” she says, waving wildly in the direction of the valley walls. “If He decorated animals with stripes or spots, why not the sand too?”

Tabita is a Catholic convert. Her tribe — the Himba — has different ideas. According to one oral myth, the circles are the footprints of ancient desert gods, while another pronounces that a dragon living beneath the Earth’s crust breathes fiery bubbles which, when they hit the surface, burn the vegetation into near-perfect rings.

In 1992, observing how the large-scale sheep-farming common to the region and ever-increasing bouts of drought were destroying the delicate desert eco-system, Namibian conservationist Albi Brückner bought up a number of livestock farms to create the reserve. japanese porn He cleared away dividing fences and built a simple tented camp, named Wolwedans, among the dunes. Once the blond desert grasses had regrown and oryx crisscrossed the sand again, he started to offer desert safaris to fund the conservation of this enormous area.