Living Desert Tour

• Swakopmund

The Namib Sand Sea was inscribed into the Unesco World Heritage List in 2013 as Namibi’s second World Heritage site, the 0only coastal desert in the world that includes extensive dunes fields influenced by fog. According to Unesco, one of the reason for its inclusion of the these fog baked dunes was the very rare behavioural, morphological and physiological adaptations that have evolved throughout its specialist communities’. So you really have to seek out some of these little critters.

A Living Desert Tour in the Dorob National Park outside Swakopmund introduces you to some of the most intriguing endemics that made to survive the extreme environment of the moving dune belt. The stars of the show are the Little Five of the Namib Desert: big-eyed, web-footed translucent palmato gecko,the Namaqua chameleon (the only chameleon in Africa that lives on the ground), the sidewinder snake, the shovel-snouted lizard and the cart-wheeling (Dancing white lady ) spider, all of the which have incredible adoptions to their environment. Leering about the geology, the flora and the tiny tracks and telltale signs of other desert dwellers-ants, crickets, scorpions, skinks, mice and the predatory jackals is fascinating stuff