Category: Namibia

Namibia has recorded somewhere between 645 and 700 bird species, of which around 515 breed here. Only one is a true endemic, the dune lark of the Namib sand sea, but a further fourteen or so near-endemics are far easier…

Namibia's desert-adapted elephants are ordinary African savanna elephants whose behaviour has changed to survive in country receiving under 100 millimetres of rain a year. Roughly 150 remain, spread across five dry riverbeds in the northwest. They cover the largest home…

Namibia has four ways of getting around and most visitors should self drive. The country has good tar between main centres, graded gravel elsewhere and almost no traffic. Public transport exists and does not serve the places tourists go. Flying…

Katutura was created by forced removal and its name says so. It is frequently translated as the place where we do not want to live, which is what the people relocated there called it. Most of Windhoek's population lives in…

Namibia's Atlantic coast runs roughly 1,570 kilometres from the Orange River to the Kunene, and almost every metre of it is protected inside a chain of national parks. The cold Benguela current keeps it fogbound and chilly year round while…

The black-faced impala is a vulnerable subspecies found only in northwestern Namibia and southwestern Angola, making it one of very few genuinely near-endemic large mammals in the country. Etosha National Park holds the largest population, established by a translocation operation…

Namibia's desert-adapted lions survive in the arid Kunene Region of the northwest, where the first systematic count across their range recorded around 57 to 60 adults plus cubs. Their numbers have swung between roughly 20 and 180 within living memory,…

Namibia holds around 12,000 Angolan giraffe, sometimes called the Namibian giraffe, and the population has grown over the past three decades against a continental trend of decline. More than half of them live on private land rather than in national…

Keetmanshoop is the main town of southern Namibia and the practical base for the region, roughly 500 kilometres south of Windhoek on the B1. Visitors stop here for the Quiver Tree Forest and Giant's Playground just outside town, the Mesosaurus…

Namibia is a specialist birding destination rather than a numbers one, and a trip here is built around fourteen near-endemics and one true endemic rather than a species count. The awkward part is that the best birding runs November to…