Author: Chard

Namibia has three serious multi day trails and a great many good day walks, and the constraint on all of them is heat. The Fish River Canyon trail runs only from May to mid September. The Naukluft trail is regarded…

The Hoba Meteorite near Grootfontein is the largest intact meteorite ever found on earth and the largest naturally occurring piece of iron known on the planet's surface, weighing around 60 tonnes. It fell roughly 80,000 years ago and has never…

The honey badger, known across southern Africa as the ratel, occurs throughout Namibia and is seen by very few visitors. It stands around 30 centimetres at the shoulder, weighs 9 to 16 kilograms, and is among the most powerful African…

Hot air ballooning over the Namib lifts off before sunrise, drifts for about an hour over the dune sea in complete silence and finishes with a sparkling wine breakfast laid out in the desert. One operator has run it at…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Namibia holds the highest density of greater kudu in Africa, and the country is also the only place in the species' range where kudu suffer recurring rabies epidemics. The first outbreak killed an estimated 50,000 animals, around a fifth of…