The Damaraland Experience

Twyfelfontein

Home to the Damara people, Damaraland is a large stretch of African savannah with rounded granite domes, table-top mountains and ephemeral rivers that thunder down their ancient courses after heavy summer rainfall to be quickly absorbed into underground aquifers for safe storage. These veins of life are wildlife havens and highways where wild rhino and desert elephants roam. The landscape intensifies into red stone in dry summers and bleached grassy stretches in more abundant seasons, but at the end of the day it always softens into dramatic pastel beauty.

This is the place where hunter-gatherer groups congregated at Twyfelfontein, the 'doubtful spring', in the dry season and where their shamans chiseled prayers into the sandstone rock. It is where ancient forests rested after tumultuous journeys down rivers, fossilising over the aeons, and where rock was fashioned into organ-like structures as if attempting to play a fusion of divine and earthy music to the endless blue sky.

It is also where Damara Mopane Lodge is found, nestled in a green forest of heart-shaped leaves; an island of bliss on the doorstep of spectacular sights. Relax on your stoep at this enchanting lodge, between sunflowers and passion fruit, cool off in the gigantic pool and watch the sun sink into the mopane woodland at the end of the day. Above the world, everything falls into perspective. Life is indeed good.