Wolwedans
Private Camp
There’s nothing new about a honeymoon suite hidden
away from the hotel hoi polloi, but sticking it nearly
a mile out into the Namib desert, with nothing but hyenas,
ostrich, and the odd passing oryx for company, is taking
the privacy thing to spectacular extremes. I’ve
stayed in some exhilarating lodges in my time, but if
you want to wake up, gaze out from your room, and feel
utterly, giddyingly alone with the world, nowhere on
the planet beats Wolwedans Private Camp.
I say ‘camp’, but we‘re not exactly
talking flysheets and carry-mats here: rustic but luxurious,
the Private Camp is a two-bedroom, wood-frame suite,
with canvas flaps that open on three sides to let the
desert breezes sift you to sleep. With vast white linens
covering the beds, en-suite bathrooms, scaly-feathered
finches nesting in the wood-beam roof and the odd jackal
sheltering in the shade beneath the floorboards, the
Private Camp is just that right blend of the sumptuous
and safari. Sit on the verandah at sunset, with the
shadows purpling across the savannah, the crags deepening
on the Losberg Mountain beyond, and the dunes burnishing
red against the last of the rays, and it’s only
the clink of ice in your G&T that reminds you you’re
not the last man on earth. Sundowners will never taste
the same again.
Mind you, with a location like this, seventy staggering
minutes by Cessna, the Private Camp is marooned on a
sea of sand and lapped by a burning tide of fired ochre
dunes –they could pretty much plonk a Travel Lodge
here and you’d still wake up feeling fiercely
alive. Epically vast, awesomely ancient, the Namib leaves
you feeling perpetually astonished, mildly delirious
just to be.
If there’s no one thing that’s better than
watching all this from the comfort of your bedroom or
sitting room, it’s seeing it close up on a safari
drive with one of Wolwedans ecological guides. OK, the
wildlife is not what you’d call East-African-plains-type
abundant, but whether you’re rooting out dung
beetles or golden moles, bat-eared foxes or oryxes,
the Namib offers spectacular riches for your desert
drives. Throw in more than 100 species of bird, hot-air
ballooning and day-safaris, where you can walk to top
of the highest dunes in the world and gaze out over
a foreverness of red-fired sand stretching all the way
to the Atlantic, and the reasons to abandon your Private
Camp for the day are obvious. |