2. Namib Desert – Namibia

In a place as hostile and desolate as the Namib, it’s a wonder anything survives at all. Even the sun-dried San hunters, tougher than riempies, held the desert in awe and called it “the land God made in anger”. But creatures do eke out a life in the waterless sand sea – and with spectacular variety and ingenuity. There are more than 200 species of beetle alone and 11 species of ant that emerge at night to sip the evening dew from the sand particles. Geckoes, lizards, moles, snakes, small antelope and wonder of wonders, the spire=horned gemsbok, which has a thermo-regulation system to baffle Isaac Newton himself.

As hostile as the Namib may be, there’s one thing that has counted in all the creatures’ favour: they’ve had plenty of time to find solutions to the waterless problems desert living has presented. It has been hot and dry since South America split from the mother continent Gondwanaland.

Between 190 and 160 million years ago, seismic forces responsible for unleashing Africa from the super continent also affected the flow of the ocean, sending an icy Antarctic current northwards just off the coasts of Southern Africa and South America. The Benguela was so cold the clouds couldn’t support rain and, because mountains blocked rain-bearing clouds from the eastern interior, the west coast of Southern Africa dried up. Over the aeons the scorching sun and hot winds weakened the mountains and hills and wore them down to fine grains of sand tinged by red oxides in the air. Very occasionally there was a flood in the desert and the sand was carried to the coast, to be deposited as dunes stretching 900 kilometres along the Atlantic coast.

Tags: Adventure, Africa, Holiday, Namib Deser, Safari, South Africa, Tour South Africa, Touring, Tourism, Travel

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