Namibia On Foot Safari

The Kalahari Desert covers a huge area of Namibia, Botswana, and South Africa. The classic scenery of long red sand dunes, which can turn green during the summer months, includes fascinating plant life and, although it is often overlooked for the epic sand dunes of the Namib desert and for the wildlife in Etosha, it still offers a raw and authentic experience with plenty of its own desert-adapted flora and fauna.

The Kalahari is also one of the ancestral homes of the Khoisan bushman, who have lived here for more than 20,000 years. Traditionally nomadic hunter-gatherers living in small cluster groups across Southern Africa, they were forced into the Kalahari away from other tribes, but now many live a more sedentary lifestyle and rely less on their traditional hunter-gatherer origins. However, to spend time with these fascinating people is truly a privilege.

Past the towns of Mariental and Reheboth, past the iconic Quiver tree forest you can travel to the south of the country to the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, one of the first ‘peace parks.’ At an impressive 38,000 km2, the area offers good wildlife viewing, where you can find cheetah and leopard as well as the famous black maned lions.

Though not a Big 5 park, the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park has plenty to offer including fantastic bird of prey sightings. The park is actually located in both South Africa and Botswana but there is a park entrance on the South African and Namibian border. To access the park, you do not even need to get a visa for South Africa, provided you also exit through the same Namibian gate again.

At more than 200,000 hectares in size, the NamibRand Nature Reserve is one of the largest private reserves in southern Africa. It was established in the 1980s when Albi Bruckner integrated several livestock farms into a protected wilderness area and today it’s a model of conservation success. There are strict rules about the number of lodges built in the area (and even stricter rules about the number of rooms each one may have), making it a totally private and entirely exclusive adventure.

Photographs may show the craggy, mauve mountains of the NamibRand, the infamous red dunes and the enormous swathes of desert, but nothing prepares for you the moment you see it for yourself. The space is humbling, the sense of peace is spiritual and it’s one of the most striking, stirring places out there. The fairy circles that dot the ground are particularly intriguing. Over the years, the theories behind them have been hotly debated (they are a result of poisonous fungi, termites, or even meteor showers), however no one really knows for certain why they are here. Just another reason to visit this extraordinary place.

You might not find the Big Five wandering around the harsh desert of the NamibRand, but the dunes are home to a variety of wildlife that has adapted in many fascinating ways in order to survive. Take, for example, the gemsbok with their white bellies that reflect the heat of the sand and their sophisticated vascular system that cools the blood around the brain. Or the bat-eared fox – those giant ears aren’t just for comic value but help to amplify the sound of their predators approaching.

What you’ll undoubtedly see most of are antelope. From gemsbok to springbok, kudu to steenbok, they can be found in most corners of the reserve, silhouetted against the red sand. You may also spot Burchell’s zebra amid the dunes as well as the more unusual black-backed jackals, aardwolves and African wild cats, which can be surprisingly easy to find compared to other reserves on the continent. Leopard and cheetah are rare but there are small numbers of both.

Sossusvlei is a photographer’s dream. In fact it is so unique and beautiful that it is hard to take a bad picture. Only a five hour drive from Namibia’s capital, Windhoek, it is one of the most sought after and unique destinations in the country. The stark yet ethereal beauty of Namibia is on full display here with the skeletal remains of old camel thorns strewn amongst salt pans, surrounded by some of the most spectacular sand dunes in the world. This endless expanse of wilderness is home to desert adapted species such as the Gemsbok (Oryx).

One of the most mysterious natural phenomena of the surrounding Namib Desert are the weird and wonderful fairy circles that give the desertscape an eerie lunar appearance. These are perfectly circular patches of grass that are inexplicably spaced evenly apart and never overlap. The area is extremely dry but every so often when it does rain it can transform the pans into a paradise for thousands of waterbirds, with the appearance of a sea of stunning wildflowers.

Swakopmund resembles a small, German coastal resort nestled between the desert and the sea. It boasts a charming combination of German colonial architecture blended with modern hotels, shops, restaurants, museums, craft centres, galleries and cafés. Swakopmund had its beginnings as a landing station in 1892 when the German Imperial Navy erected beacons on the site. Settlers followed and made attempts to create a harbour town by constructing a concrete Mole and then an iron jetty – which attempts were ultimately unsuccessful.

The advent of World War one halted developments, and the town sank into decline until half a century later when infrastructure improved and an asphalt road opened between Windhoek and Swakopmund. This made reaching the previously isolated town quicker and easier and it prospered once again to become Namibia’s premier resort town. Although the sea is normally cold for swimming there are pleasant beaches and the cooler climate is refreshing after time spent in the desert.

Swakopmund is just a few hours drive from Namibia’s capital and provides easy access to the Spitzkoppe, another very popular unique destination. A short drive via a scenic coastal road reaches the fishing town of Walvisbay. This road is an excellent place to marvel at the endless desert dunes as they meet the Atlantic Ocean.

In 1991, a group of Namibian, English, American, and South African nature lovers joined forces to purchase 34,000 hectares — about 84,000 acres — of land on the southern boundary of Etosha National Park. Most of the territory was unproductive farmland, a testament to the harsh conditions endured by cattle ranchers in one of the world’s most rain-scarce regions. The dream was to rehabilitate that arid landscape and transform it into a sanctuary for endangered wildlife, beginning with one of the most threatened species of them all: the white rhinoceros.

The transformation of unproductive farmland into the Ongava Game Reserve, a sanctuary for the threatened black and white rhino, as well as other species, is one of Africa’s great conservation success stories.

Ongava means “rhino” in the Herero language, but more than that, it means a place where these magnificent creatures can thrive in their natural habitat, alongside lion, leopard, elephant, cheetah, giraffe, gemsbok, springbok, red hartebeest, eland, wildebeest, zebra, the rare black faced impala, and hundreds of other species.

With four luxury lodges catering to a limited number of guests, Ongava Game Reserve has become a model of safe and responsible ecotourism too, while the Ongava Research Centre serves as a hub for groundbreaking study by scientists and researchers from across the globe.

Ongava also provides easy access to the prime game viewing areas of central Etosha, Namibia’s flagship national park.

Day 8 – Etosha National Park

Etosha National Park, translated as the ‘Place of Mirages’, Land of Dry Water’ or the ‘Great White Place’, covers 22,270 km², of which over 5,000 km² is made up of saline depressions or ‘pans’. The largest of these pans, the Etosha Pan, can be classified as a saline desert in its own right. The Etosha Pan lies in the Owambo Basin, on the north-western edge of the Namibian Kalahari Desert. Until three million years ago it formed part of a huge, shallow lake that was reduced to a complex of salt pans when the major river that fed it, the Kunene, changed course and began to flow to the Atlantic instead.

If the lake existed today, it would be the third largest in the world. Etosha Pan is the largest of the pans at 4,760 km² in extent.

In the late dry season animals congregate in the hundreds around the many water sources, queuing to quench their thirst. When the rains arrive the area is transformed, bringing a plethora of birdlife that comes to take advantage of ideal feeding conditions. Thousands of flamingos and other water birds descend to the flooded salt pans to take advantage of this time of plenty.

Onguma Private Reserve comprises 34,000 hectares of private wilderness on the eastern border of Etosha National Park. The nature reserve boasts over thirty different animal species consisting of plains game including kudu, giraffe, eland, oryx, hartebeest, zebra, impala and many more roam freely as well as predators such as lion, cheetah, leopard, being common residents of the area. The latest addition to the already abundant wildlife at Onguma Nature Reserve is a family of black rhinos.

During the Namibian summer months Onguma becomes a bird-watcher’s paradise with thousands of species migrating to the wetlands created by the seasonal rains and ephemeral river systems.

Etosha National Park is a national park in the north west of Namibia. Proclaimed a park in 1907, it is home to four of the Big Five and offers amazing game sightings all year round.

West of the Waterberg Plateau Park, vast plains are occasionally broken by remnants of ancient sandstone outcrops, which once covered large areas of northern Namibia. Nestled among the Omboroko Mountains, in a Malaria-free area, lies Okonjima – a Herero name meaning “Place of the baboons.”

The Okonjima Nature Reserve, a huge protected area set amongst the rugged commercial farmlands of central Namibia, comprises a diversified ecosystem representative of both the larger and small mammals of Namibia, as well as most of the country’s endemic birds. The Okonjima Nature Reserve is home to, and runs extensive research projects on, rare and endangered species big and small.

The Okonjima Nature Reserve sprawls over 200 square kilometres of undulating plains, mountainous outcrops, and riverine thickets, and it is here that leopard (Panthera pardus), the most adaptable of all the wild cats, thrive.

These intelligent, solitary predators occur in high density in the expanse of Okonjima Nature Reserve’s multi-faceted topography. The Reserve’s predator research programme has spanned three decades, and its findings have provided great insight to leopard behavioral patterns as well as offered an upbeat prognosis for a sustainable future for the species in today’s Africa.

Okonjima is a family-run business. Wayne, Donna and Rosalea Hanssen, who co-own and live on the property, bought Okonjima from their parents, Val and Rose, in 1993, and turned the then cattle farm into a conservation project. Okonjima is so much more than simply an African safari lodge. It is also home to The AfriCat Foundation, which was established when Chinga the Cheetah was bought by the Hanssen’s at a cattle auction and given a home on Okonjima.

The AfriCat Foundation

The AfriCat Foundation seeks to do what it can to conserve large carnivores in Namibia. Founded in 1991, AfriCat is perfectly situated to conduct ecological research focusing on a variety of rare and endangered species. As Okonjima is an enclosed nature reserve, one component of AfriCat’s research focuses on understanding the ecology of leopard and brown hyaenas living within Okonjima, with the ultimate aim of producing informed, sustainable metapopulation management guidelines for these species.

Okonjima was a cattle farm since the early 1920s that was bought by Brahman breeders Val (VJ) and Rose Hanssen in 1970. By the time Namibia gained its independence in early 1990, they needed to address increasing livestock losses and growing interest in Namibia as a tourist destination. Three years later their herds of Brahman and Jersey cattle were sold and Okonjima’s attention turned to recovering the grass plains and transforming it into a nature reserve, with a primary focus on carnivore conservation through The AfriCat Foundation.