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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Big Daddy is the tallest dune in the Sossusvlei area at roughly 325 metres, standing between Sossusvlei pan and Deadvlei. The climb follows a ridge and takes most people between forty five minutes and two hours, finishing with a descent…

Deadvlei is a white clay pan in the Namib Desert holding the blackened skeletons of camel thorn trees that died centuries ago and never decayed, ringed by orange dunes rising more than 300 metres. Visitors reach it on foot, about…