Behind Asia, Africa is the second largest continent in the world and is home to three of the world’s largest deserts, the Sahara, The Namib Desert and the Kalahari Desert. Together these vast array of diverse land masses cover a large area of the African continent and hold the key to millions of years worth of history. These regions are areas of natural beauty but it doesn’t take away the fact they are hostile, treacherous regions that hold very little life. The only people who live in the desert regions are nomads who travel from village to village trading goods.
Most tourists travel to Africa on one of three types of trips, a Botswana safari or a safari in South Africa or they travel to the continent on an adventure trip to locations including Victoria Falls and the Garden Route where bungee jumping, canyon swinging and sky diving are all activities people can sink their teeth into. More and more tour operators are now offering trips to the more desolate desert regions to take part in sand boarding and quad biking and in some cases stay in the desert for up to a week at the time.
Although the majority of tourists still prefer the typical Kenya safari there are a lot more people looking for extreme adventure in Africa, whether its paragliding, skydiving or camping out in the desert for a week or so. The deserts of Africa are now beginning to attract as many tourists as those climbing Kilimanjaro every year. Due to the African deserts being so vast it’s highly unlikely there will be any confrontation between local nomadic tribes and tourists especially in the nations of Algeria, Morocco, Libya and Tunisia.
The Namib Desert is the most visited by tourists simply because the majority of the Namibian coastal region is dominated by desert. In Namibia the main attractions are the Namib-Naukluft National Park and the Skeleton coast that are all located in the oldest desert in the world. Home to some of the highest sand dunes in the world, the Namib Desert is visited by tourists all year round to view these magnificent spectacles.
The deserts in Africa are ever changing environments, expanding their reaches for few years and then retracting and becoming home to an abundance of new flora and fauna when the occasional rains do fall.