For those who find themselves awed by arid landscapes, there\u2019s no place like Africa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The continent boasts nine separate deserts, including a vast Sahara that sprawls across much of the north, the rust-colored Kalahari of the southwest, and the bizarre Turkana Basin of northern Kenya.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
All of them have unique origin stories about the Earth forces that created their incredible terrain and tales about the people who have long inhabited some of the planet\u2019s driest, hottest, most inhospitable spaces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For modern visitors, Africa\u2019s deserts offer romantic settings, striking landscapes and a variety of outdoor adventures that reflect the unique personalities of each place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Here are eight different ways to discover desert Africa:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Even Salvador Dal\u00ed couldn\u2019t have rendered a landscape this surreal \u2014 lurid orange dunes towering more than 1,000 feet (300 meters) above a ghostly forest of dead camelthorn trees and bizarre, almost perfectly round, \u201cfairy circles\u201d that some people attribute to alien visitors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The place is called Sossusvlei in\u00a0Namib-Naukluft National Park\u00a0in the middle of what researchers consider the world\u2019s oldest desert \u2014 formed between 55 and 80 million years ago when dinosaurs still walked the Earth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the language of the local Nama people, the name Namib means \u201ca place where there\u2019s nothing.\u201d But nowadays there are plenty of ways to explore the park\u2019s iconic dunes including horseback rides, 4×4 tours, helicopters, hot-air balloons, and trekking to the summit of sandy rust-colored monsters like Big Daddy, Dune 45 and Dune 7 (tallest of them all at approximately 1,273 feet\/388 meters).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For those who find themselves awed by arid landscapes, there\u2019s no place like Africa. The continent boasts nine separate deserts, including a vast Sahara that sprawls across much of the north, the rust-colored Kalahari of the southwest, and the bizarre Turkana Basin of northern Kenya. All of them have unique origin stories about the Earth […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":39799,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,212,33],"tags":[7,213,34],"class_list":{"0":"post-39795","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-featured","8":"category-history","9":"category-travel","10":"tag-apie-project","11":"tag-history","12":"tag-travel"},"yoast_head":"\n