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Sustainable Tourism<br />
Community Conservancy is one of the Earth’s richest reservoirs of<br />
plant and animal life, regarded as the only Arid Biodiversity Hotspot<br />
on Earth. The conservancy is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site,<br />
designated the ‘Richtersveld Cultural and Botanical Landscape’. The<br />
two areas together have an astonishing variety of plant, bird and<br />
animal life, much of it endemic.<br />
The area is a constantly changing canvas of natural beauty: from its<br />
rugged, high mountain desert, to areas covered in flowers in the<br />
spring, to arid sandy plains, lush river vegetation and birdlife, and an<br />
eerie Martian landscape of giant boulders spewed up by an ancient<br />
and very angry volcanic eruption. This may well have been God’s<br />
creation laboratory.<br />
Great silence<br />
www.jaquesmarais.co.za / SONY<br />
Once you leave the noisy Atlantic Ocean driving inland, the great<br />
silence takes hold of you. It is the same solid silence you find within<br />
the people who live here, a small part of which you will take home with<br />
you and cherish forever. It is totally devoid of the noise and the rush<br />
of modern life outside the area. Like the land here, so are the people.<br />
They landed here from every direction over a period spanning many<br />
centuries: the pastoral Nama farmers, the San hunter-gatherers,<br />
Griquas, Basters and a sprinkling of Afrikaner trekboere (nomadic<br />
farmers). Today their descendants live here in harmony like the<br />
boulders, rocks, unique vegetation and diverse animal life, next to and<br />
among each other.<br />
MZANZI TRAVEL| www.mzanzitravel.co.za|ISSUE 4 | 67
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