In 2015, Walter Chinkel was on a safari in Namibia.

He was there at his wife and a guide.

And so he had suggested that one of the stops we make was in this place, Volvodans, from the eastern edge of the Namib Desert.

And he wanted to do that because he said there's this phenomenon there that I think you'd find very interesting.

Walter's a retired entomologist.

He's worked with a whole bunch of different kinds of insects, mostly ants.

But he likes to do work outside that zone as well. Yeah, I'm an explorer and I like

unexplained phenomena that other people are not looking at that hasn't attracted their

attention. And I'm also very much an experimentalist. So I test ideas with experiments. The unexplained phenomenon that the

guide wanted Walter to see was something called fairy circles. And I'd never heard of fairy circles

before. So as we circled in over the landing strip, you know, you could see this landscape. It was like

full of holes, thousands of them as far as you could see. It was quite remarkable.

I'm Johanna Mayer, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places.

Today, we're heading into the Namib Desert with Walter, to experience a natural occurrence so enchanting that locals describe it as the footprints of the gods.

After this. Nami Brat Nature Reserve is just a wonderful place.

It's very remote, at least four hours from the nearest town of any kind.

And you're in this magical landscape of red dunes and just spaces.

And then at the margin there's these granite mountains.

And every day, the wind comes up.

As it warms up, it blows toward the plateau, and then the evening

it blows toward the sea. Walter has been to the Namib Desert a few times. On one trip,

he rented an old house at the base of 300-foot dunes. And the dunes were clearly going to win.

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