Blog

The Tassili n’Ajjer National Park, UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1982, is an outstanding plateau of about 70.000 km² composed mostly of black and red sandstone that, due to the erosion, has spectacular shapes of canyons, natural rock arches and volcanic ridges.

The National Park, located in the south-eastern area of Algeria at the borders of Mali, Niger and Libya, reachable from the town of Djanet, is one of the most important archaeological sites in the world, with a well-preserved collection of remains and over 15,000 rock engravings and drawings dating back to the Neolithic era.

The area (about 42.000 hectares) is divided into three well-defined zones: the Bardena Negra, the Plano and the Bardena Blanca.

Landscape, temperature and movie location (in 1999 it was the set of a nuclear bunker in James Bond – The World is not Enough and recently it has become the Dothraki Sea in the popular TV series Game of Thrones) make this area similar to the Western U.S.A. famous national parks.

Wolf Island and Darwin Island: June and December

Located at the punto triple, the border between Brazil, Guyana and Venezuela, the Mount Roraima (Roroi-ma) is, along with the Auyantepui (where is the Salto del Angel,  the world’s highest waterfall), the most famous Tepui in South America.
The Tepui (in Pemòn language “house of the Gods”) are table-top mountains formed after the erosion of the sandstone plateau that once covered the granite base between the Amazon forest and the Orinoco River, and between the Atlantic coast and the Rio Negro.

According to the beliefs of the Pemòn (people who inhabited the Gran Sabana area for centuries), Mount Roraima was originally a huge tree which bore all the fruits and vegetables of the world. After the tree fall, his stump, turned to stone, later became the house of the Gods. Due to his sacred status, the Pemòn people never attempted to climb the Roraima, so the mountain remained unexplored for many years.

The first exploration was led by Walter Raleigh, in 1596; later, the legend of Mount Roraima was the inspiration for the Scottish writer Arthur Conan Doyle in his novel The Lost World (1912) and for the Werner Herzog‘s movie The Wild Blue Yonder (2005).

Today the Mount Roraima can be visited (joining a guided tour) by travelers and tourists: with its beautiful natural landscapes including the Valley of the Crystals, the sinkhole El Foso and the Labyrinth it is one of the most fascinating destinations of the American continent, although there are no lost world’s dinosaurs.

The Carcharodon Carcharias, commonly known as the great white shark, lives in the coastal waters of all the major oceans.

We suggest you to contact the local companies to check the sharks presence before planning the trip.

DON’T miss it if you are traveling in these places… and don’t think about Steven Spielberg’s cult movie Jaws…

** November 2020 update about the presence of white sharks in South Africa**

In the past three years, there has been a significant decline in the number of great white sharks in Gansbaai, one of the best places in the world to meet the majestic predators. Although a lot of news reported that the decline has been caused by Orcas attacks, the local research institutes expressed their concern about that: Orcas could have had an impact on the shark’s reduction, but several other reasons have to be considered, such as lack of protection of the environment, a decrease of food sources and fishing nets.

However, in the last months of 2020, some of the Shark Diving Companies reported sightings of a few great white sharks in the bay.

For further information, read the interesting report on White Shark Diving Company’s blog page at the following link:

The Polar Aurora, well known as Aurora Borealis/Australis or Northern/Southern Lights depending on which hemisphere it occurs, is an optical phenomenon of the atmosphere, characterized by green, blue and red luminous bands with a different range of shapes.

The phenomenon, visible in two stripes around the magnetic poles and more intense and frequent during high solar activity, is caused by the interaction of charged electrons of the solar wind with the earth’s ionosphere (a process similar to the neon lamp light).
The color depends on the atmosphere’s gases: atomic oxygen is responsible for the green, the molecular oxygen for the red and nitrogen for the blue color.