Author: Chard

Uis is a former tin mining town of around 3,600 people at the foot of Namibia's highest mountain. It was downgraded from village to settlement in 2010, which tells you what happened when the mine closed. It survives on passing…

Swakopmund is Namibia's coastal holiday town and its adventure capital, sitting where the Namib Desert runs straight into the cold Atlantic. Visitors come for sandboarding, quad biking and skydiving over the dunes, and for a preserved German colonial town centre…

Closing a place to people for a century turns out to be an effective conservation method. The Sperrgebiet was sealed off in 1908 to protect diamonds and inadvertently protected one of the world's great biodiversity hotspots. It holds around 1,050…

Solitaire is a petrol station, a general store, a bakery and a scatter of rusting vintage cars half swallowed by sand. It is barely a town and it is the most famous stop on any Namib road trip, for apple…

Shark Island was a death camp and it is now a campsite. Between 1,032 and 3,000 Herero and Nama men, women and children died here between March 1905 and April 1907. The German garrison called it Death Island. Namibia declared…

Self drive Namibia trips work well because the country has good roads, low traffic and clear signage, though more than 80 percent of the network is gravel rather than tar. Most visitors hire a 4x4 in Windhoek and cover 2,000…

Ruacana is Namibia's largest waterfall and it is dry most of the year. At 107 metres high and up to 700 metres wide in flood it ranks among Africa's largest by volume and width. A hydroelectric station above it diverts…

Namibia holds around 250 reptile species and 59 of them are endemic, close to a quarter, which makes it one of the better countries in the world for finding and photographing reptiles. The Namib produces specialists found nowhere else: a…

Namibia is among the most photographed countries in Africa and almost all of it comes down to timing. Deadvlei needs the first ninety minutes after sunrise. Moon Valley is worthless at midday. The dunes flatten to grey between ten and…

Palmwag Concession covers around 550,000 hectares of basalt semi-desert in northwestern Namibia and is the country's largest tourism concession on communal land. It holds the largest free roaming black rhino population on earth, tracked on foot with community trackers. The…