Namibia
Namibia is easily reached with a connecting flight from Johannesburg to Windhoek, or, depending where you start your journey, you could also connect from Cape Town or Victoria Falls. I was fortunate to travel by private jet with my group between destinations, but self-drive is also very common (and very safe) here, utilising 4 WD vehicles.
Landing at Okonjima game reserve, our pilot had to do a ‘fly by’ sweep of the landing strip, checking for wildlife, before landing. We headed straight out to see the Africat foundation centre, where they aim to educate the youth (and others) about the wildlife and is also a research centre. Conservation is very much key here. The camp is very open and what could be more special than enjoying a gin and tonic, overlooking the waterhole where warthogs were bathing?
In order to see the best of the game, game drives take place early morning and late afternoon, when the heat of the sun is not so strong. Sometimes the 5am call is a bit of a killer, but spotting a female leopard and tracking and observing her for a couple of hours, more than makes up for it! I was certainly spoilt that morning, seeing plentiful game including elephants, zebra, giraffe, kudu and wildebeest.
From Okonjima, we flew north to Etosha National Park, home to the Etosha Salt pan, the largest in Africa, it can even be seen from space. Another fly by before landing, saw elephant bordering the edge of the strip. A lot of the park is very flat, but we stayed higher up at the beautiful Etosha Heights camp, just on the edge of the park, with spectacular views to waterholes below. There’s accommodation within the park too, mostly Government run, but useful if you’re driving across the park from end to end.
I was more than pleasantly surprised by the game reserves, my prior impression of Namibia had been that it would be a very ‘bare’ landscape, due to the desert. But the national parks are certainly not, despite very little rainfall. There is plenty of flora and fauna to be seen, as well as birdlife and the guides are extremely knowledgeable.
For something very different, we headed into ‘Damaraland’, basing at Twyfelfontein. The scenery changed dramatically on our flight and became more as I had expected, lots of rock formations (very red) and more sparse vegetation. I was keen to see the desert elephant, who have adapted to the habitat very well – whereas elephants are often destructive and will rip shrubs from the ground or simply bulldoze them when they’ve had enough, the desert elephants take what they want from the trees and then move on, ensuring there’s plenty for them to return to. I was not disappointed, our guide found a herd of over 20 and we observed and followed them for a few hours, including a calf that was only 10 days old!
We also experienced the bushman rock carvings – absolutely fascinating to see, our guide pointed out the different symbols depicting different animals or waterholes and how to work out which way they were pointing. These are thousands of years old and now roped off to try to slow down erosion of them.