Author: Chard

Namibia was the first African country to write environmental protection into its constitution, and it went further by giving rural communities legal rights over the wildlife on their own land. Around 87 communal conservancies now cover roughly a fifth of…

The single most expensive mistake in Namibian travel is the insurance clause nobody reads. Basic rental cover frequently excludes single vehicle accidents, meaning rolling on gravel or swerving to avoid a kudu, which is exactly how Namibian accidents happen. Standard…

The Caprivi Strip, now officially the Zambezi Region, is a narrow finger of land running east from Namibia's northern border between Angola, Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Four perennial rivers make it the only genuinely green part of the country, holding…

Katima Mulilo sits on the Zambezi River at the far eastern tip of Namibia, well over 1,200 kilometres from Windhoek, closer to Lusaka and Harare than to its own capital. It is the regional capital of the Zambezi Region and…

Kaokoland is the remotest part of Namibia reachable by road, a mountainous stretch of the Kunene Region running north to the Angolan border where the Himba still live largely as they have for centuries. Opuwo is the only real supply…

Namibia holds the largest free-ranging cheetah population in the world, and around 90 percent of it lives outside protected areas on commercial and communal farmland rather than in national parks. That single fact shapes everything about cheetah conservation here. The…

Kamanjab is the crossroads of northwestern Namibia, the point where routes to Etosha's western gate, Damaraland, the Kunene and the coast separate. It is a small farming settlement with fuel, a shop and guest farms, and its value is entirely…

The Kalahari occupies eastern and southeastern Namibia and it is not a true desert, which surprises most visitors. It receives too much rain to qualify, supports grass, camel thorn woodland and substantial wildlife, and is better described as a semi-arid…

Two jackal species occur in Namibia, and one of them you will see constantly while the other you almost certainly will not. Black backed jackal are common countrywide, from the Skeleton Coast where they hunt seal pups to the farmland…

Ten days is the honest minimum for a first Namibian trip and fourteen is better. Seven works if you accept covering two places rather than four. The constraint is not distance on a map but the fact that gravel driving…