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Wolwedans Dune Lodge, Namibia - hotel review

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, 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.

The reserve, a vast, privately owned area covering almost 495,000 acres, has made it its mission to preserve these unusual phenomena, and the desert landscape that hosts them.

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. 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.

(Wolwedans)
(Wolwedans)

Wolwedans now comprises four camps, designed to have minimal environmental impact — solar energy is used to power lights and fridges, vegetables are grown in a desert oasis and water usage is monitored.

We stay at the impossibly situated Dunes Lodge, where nine canvas-fronted rooms perch on marmalade-orange sand. Golden dunes roll in unbroken waves to the startlingly blue horizon.

Safaris here are not about ticking off the “Big Five”. We are awed, not by dangerous game but simply by winding a snaking course through these bewildering, beautiful, baking-hot lands. The animals we do see — oryx, ostrich and occasionally springbok — have learnt to go without drinking water, sometimes for up to a week. Their only moisture comes from the sea mist, rolling in from the South Atlantic, dampening the desert grasses.

“To live in the desert you have to be clever,” says Tabita. The fog-basking tok tokkie beetle stands on its head on dune tops to catch the fog, which drips down into its mouth, she explains by way of an example.

We scramble out of our Land Rover and trace the feathery tracks of a golden mole and a pair of elephant shrews across a flat section of dune. We find a pale-skinned horned adder coiled, almost indistinguishable, between the dusty roots of a quiver tree.

Early evening, having driven to a lookout point, we return to the subject of fairy circles. Scientists, says Tabita, believe the ring-like roots of poisonous euphorbia plants could be causing the bare circles. Our conversation is interrupted by Tabita charging up a dune in pursuit of a Cape fox. We trail in her wake, our trainers filling with sand.

Another option, she says, is the underground activities of termites beneath the sand. Several sand termite experts have been to the reserve, yet their research is inconclusive. “It’s a mystery,” she concludes happily as the sun turns the dunes to the colour of paprika.

Along with its conservation efforts, the reserve funds a centre where visiting zoologists and botanists have studied camel thorn trees, aardwolves and wedge-snouted lizards — and scratched their heads over fairy circles. You can actually adopt one of the circles. For NAD 1,000 (£60), a numbered disc is placed on a circle and you are given a certificate recording its exact co-ordinates. The money goes towards the conservation of the reserve.

“Alien landings?” says a guest at dinner. “Diamond mining,” says another. We’re seated out on the wooden decking. The stars twinkle like thousands of floating fairies, just waiting to land.

Details: Namibia

South African Airways (flysaa.com) flies from Heathrow to Windhoek via South Africa from £753 return. Wolwedans Dune Lodge (wolwedans.com) costs from £341, all-inclusive.