Estate Living Magazine Alfresco Living - Issue 36 December 2018 | Page 65

Heaven’s ebon vault, studded with stars unutterably bright,
through which the moon’s unclouded grandeur rolls, seems like a
canopy which love has spread to curtain her sleeping world.’’
Percy Bysshe Shelley
For a dedicated open-air experience, Skybeds is an intimate lodge with only three ‘rooms’, and each ‘room’ is a five metre high
platform with a bed and mosquito net, overlooking the only waterhole for miles. So you can sleep way out in the bush under the stars
but safe from the abundant wildlife (including the mozzies). naturalselection.travel/camp/skybeds
I’ve been a keen hiker since forever, so I don’t remember the first
time I slept under the stars, but I do have particularly evocative
memories of sleeping out in the open – and I do mean open
– in the Namib. I was on a nine-day horse trail from Windhoek
to Swakopmund, and we spent quite a few days way out in the
desert – no roads, no fences and, in some places, no plants and
not even any mountains on the horizon. Once we’d extinguished
the campfire there was absolutely zero light pollution, and it was
like swimming in an upside-down bowl of stars that reached
right down to the horizon 360/360.
There’s probably nowhere on earth that can match the Namib for
wide-open spaces and zero light pollution, but we in southern
Africa are spoiled. It’s a fact (honestly) that you can see more
stars in the southern hemisphere than in the northern – and not
just because there’s less light pollution: it’s all to do with the fact
that we are closer to the centre of the Milky Way – or something
like that.
So, while long-distance trailists of various kinds still get to lay their
sleeping bags out in the open quite regularly, sleeping under the
The starry vault of heaven is in truth the
open book of cosmic projection.’’ Carl Jung
The joy of deserts is that there is very little chance of rain and no risk of malaria, so Little Kulala’s
star bed is really minimalist. wilderness-safaris.com/our-camps/camps/little-kulala
estate-living.co.za
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