Namibia Highlights Self Drive

Eleven nights in a loop from Windhoek, self-guided and tailor-made, across Namibia in a 4×4 with three nights in Etosha.

Namibia is the easiest country in Africa to drive yourself: the gravel roads are wide and well graded, the distances are long, the traffic is almost nonexistent and the camps are used to self-drive arrivals.

Sossusvlei comes first, where the dunes rise three hundred metres from the Namib and Deadvlei sits beneath them, a white clay pan studded with camel thorn trees that died eight hundred years ago and never rotted in the dry air. Swakopmund follows on the coast, a German colonial town with the desert on one side and the cold Atlantic on the other. Damaraland takes two nights, looking for the desert-adapted elephants that range through the dry riverbeds, then Etosha for three, where the game concentrates round the waterholes on the edge of a vast salt pan, with lion, leopard and cheetah among it. The Okonjima reserve closes the loop.

The necessary transfers, the 4×4 hire and the activities listed in the itinerary are included; flights are not. The vehicle takes up to five people, with larger ones available. The price shown is per person excluding flights. The dry season from May to October is the window, since that is when the game comes to the water. No wildlife sighting can be promised, which is the honest position on any safari and especially on a self-drive one. Twelve days is enough to cover the dunes, the coast and the game parks without a punishing daily drive, and the three nights at Etosha are what separate this from the shorter Namibian itineraries.