Great adventure and my first trip to Africa. Starting in South Africa with good wine and penguins, onto Namibia seeing the second largest canyon in the world, ancient cave paintings and sunrise at the Sossusvlei dunes. It’s a great trip if you are no rush and limited by time. Sit back and enjoy the scenery go by. Extend your trip both at the beginning and end. There’s lots to do in Cape Town and many adventure activities to try in Victoria Falls. Wildlife in Etosha and Chobe was incredible. Abundance of zebras, giraffes, elephants and special spottings of cheetahs, lions. Kanoeing on the Orange river and the mokoro ride in Botswana were also special things to mention. The long drive days are a small sacrifice to see all there is on the itinerary!
Namib-Naukluft National Park
Namib-Naukluft National Park Trips
Namib-Naukluft National Park is an ecological reserve in the Namib Desert in southwest Africa, thought to be Earth’s oldest desert.
The park is the largest game reserve in Africa and contains a surprising collection of creatures who manage to survive in the hyper-arid region, including snakes, geckos, hyenas and jackals. Some of the highly specialised desert dwellers include the Welwitschia plant, considered a living fossil, and the fog-basking beetle; life in the Namib depends on fog from the Atlantic rather than rain. Much of the area is inaccessible, but Namib-Naukluft National Park tours will give you the chance to appreciate its most prominent attraction, the Sossusvlei area, where high orange sand dunes surround vivid while salt pans.
Namib Naukluft Adventure Holidays
Anna Lastuvkova Cape Town to Victoria Falls – Hotel/Lodge
Simone Pfluegl Discover Namibia – LodgesI really enjoyed getting to see all the animals you usually only see in books or Disney movies: Lions, meerkats, elephants, mongoose… the list goes forever. As if this wasn’t enough, the Namibian landscape is varied and impressive with sand dunes, mountains and the ocean. This trip takes you to all of these, and offers unforgettable adventures, such as tracking rhinos on foot or flying over the desert in a helicopter!
The pace of this trip is gentle enough that you will get some R&R in besides all the action, but is never boring – how could it be when there’s so much to see and do?
Michael Nutt Discover Namibia – LodgesWe booked this trip to celebrate my 70th birthday, aware that it included some long days on rough bumpy roads and a couple of challenging walks. I am very fit for my age but did find the itinerary very intense, with numerous early morning starts (a 6:15 alarm felt like a lie in for us!) and little time for relaxation or recovery (apart from the free day in Swakopmund, when we declined all the optional activities). The walk in Brandberg was difficult underfoot, with lots of rocks to negotiate and boulders to scramble over, with the potential to twist an ankle with each step; we were rewarded by the sight of cave paintings dating over 2,000 years, which fascinated me but may not be to everyone’s interest. The walking trail at Waterberg is even more challenging, and nobody in our group completed it (one couple went part of the way up); most opted for a game drive that took us onto the plateau, and we were fortunate to come upon a group of giraffes at a waterhole / salt lick at close quarters, but otherwise there was little to see on the drive. I would have liked to have experienced and learned more about the history and culture of the country. Waterberg is a place of great significance in the Herero genocide and I think time could have been better spent exploring its historical aspects (there is a German cemetery there but we had no time to visit it), instead of the walking trail or the optional game drive. And the brief encounter with Himba and Herero people on day 7 was merely a photo and shopping opportunity (you had to pay to take photos – I declined – and nobody in our group bothered with the market stalls); I would have preferred to have spent time seeing their village and learning about their culture and history.
That’s the negative aspects of the trip dealt with. On the positive side, Namibia is a country of contrasting landscapes, each of them impressive in its own way: red ochre sand dunes, lunar landscapes, vast open plains and grasslands, strange granite outcrops, desolate mountains, limitless horizons … and the grandeur of the Waterberg Plateau, a table top mountain fringed with bare granite and best appreciated from below and a short distance away. We saw a variety of wildlife along the way, and a good deal in Etosha, although the recent rains after a three year drought meant that game was hard to spot in the tall grass and vegetation that had sprung up; we saw no leopards, briefly glimpsed a few cheetahs (although we got up close to a group in the cheetah conservatory early in the trip), and spotted the head of a lone male lion resting in the long grass and watching us for a short moment. But we had some amazing encounters with elephants, giraffes, wildebeest and zebra, and saw many different antelopes and other fauna. Unfortunately the flamingos had left Walvis Bay, and the desert elephants were no longer in the valley at Brandberg, which was disappointing. Wildlife watching is mostly a matter of luck, and nothing is guaranteed.The best wildlife encounter was the rhino safari at the end of the trip, when we walked to within 20 feet of three white rhino at Eagle’s Rest; an unforgettable experience.
There were many other interesting sights and experiences along the way: countless giant ground crickets, almost everywhere we went; walking through the Sesriem Canyon ; old German colonial architecture in Swakopmund; eating apple strudel and ice cream at Anton’s Cafe; the Zeila wreck on the Skeleton Coast; pet meerkats in Brandberg White Lady Lodge.
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