Namibia
Namibia has landscapes of astonishing desolation, abundant wildlife, vast deserts, ancient cave paintings, several mining ghost towns and a 50 ton meteorite. Add a first-world infrastructure, the world’s highest cheetah population and lowest human density - less than two million inhabitants in a country twice the size of France - and your inner explorer perks up. In Namibia, you could be 50km away from the next human, who might be an Ovambo, Kavango, Herero, Damara, a white settler or Bushman (San). Swakopmund is bordered by the freezing Atlantic Ocean on one side and the sweltering Namib Desert on the other. Its architecture is reminiscent of Germany in the 1930s; restaurants serve German meals and most of the people speak German there too.
The brutal beauty of Sossusvlei in central Namibia is unforgettable. Here, pale chanting goshawks perch in black, twisted, petrified trees on parched flatlands flanked by the saw-toothed ridges of faraway hills. A white clay pan dotted with feathery acacias surrounds massive apricot-hued dunes, reputed to be the tallest in the world. Foxes and gazelle live among these Andes of sand while long wasps whirr against relentless blue skies.
The Waterberg plateau, a gargantuan table-land buttressed by red pillars of rock is home to warthogs, baboons, kudu, eland and the delicate little Dik Dik antelope.
To the north is Etosha Pan, a large salt marsh that attracts thousands of flamingos, black rhino, elephant, giraffe, lions and zebra. The Caprivi Strip, shaped like an admonishing finger, thrusts east between Angola and Botswana in a ruler-straight border of land just 30 km wide and 400 km long, widening slightly as it touches Zambia and Zimbabwe.
The East Caprivi’s high rainfall and warm winter provides a home to plants, birds and animals that cannot survive in Namibia’s more arid biomes.
In the 1980s, the strip was a militarised zone used by the former South African Defence Force as a base against SWAPO. Today little of the war legacy lingers, the game has returned in abundance and the Strip is destined for greater things.
Five rivers converge here and the swampy flood plains are home to an abundance of wildlife, including 75 % of Namibia’s bird species (around 438 varieties). Along the Kwando River sandy river banks are sculpted by carmine bee-eaters into avian apartment blocks resembling Swiss cheese. Monitor lizards slither menacingly along the banks in search of eggs and defenceless chicks. And boy, will you see crocs and hippo!
Plans are underway to merge the area into a Transfrontier Park of around 26.6 million ha, the biggest in the world. Go now, before the rest of the world hears about it!
