Namibia Has A few of Africa’s Greatest Landscapes and Lodges

It rained on my first night in Namibia, nicely earlier than I used to be able to understand the auspicious great thing about such an occasion. My husband, Ryan, and I had been with the photographer Michael Turek at Zannier Omaanda, a lodge exterior the capital of Windhoek. We had been initially of a three-part journey by means of a rustic that’s bigger than Texas however has a inhabitants smaller than that of Connecticut—some 3 million. The three of us had been to fly north by Cessna to the Hoanib Valley, then farther north to the Kunene River, on the Angolan border, earlier than flying again south to the Namib Desert, one of the oldest on the earth. 

Omaanda, which is about on 35 sq. miles of savanna, was meant to be a relaxation cease earlier than the odyssey forward. It was the second day of the brand new yr, and I used to be exhilarated by the wildlife we noticed on a safari that afternoon: Luna the lioness, yawning languidly; a pair of tuskers bumping their foreheads in play; three armor-plated white rhinos; and numerous sorts of antelope, from impalas to tiny steenbok. However Turek, now on his third go to to the nation, was clear. “Namibia shouldn’t be about animals,” he mentioned. “It’s concerning the landscapes.”

We received out of the jeep to stretch. Instantly, thunder rumbled. Above the nice arid expanse, a column of rain appeared. An African sky of many moods got here into sharp reduction, right here lit volcanic crimson by the setting solar, there as clear and cloudless as a ceiling fresco in an Italian church. Then all of it got here collectively. The lava broke its bounds and engulfed the sky. The pillar of rain turned an ashen orange. I used to be enthralled by the drama and appeared to Turek, now frantically taking pictures, for affirmation. “Once they convey out their telephones,” he mentioned, gesturing to our information, Jansen Namaseb, who was taking an image out of the open-sided safari automobile, “you already know it’s main.” 

“Biggest sundown ever,” Turek mentioned when the sunshine had lastly died. The rain, which had been stalking us on the savanna, was now in full stream. It adopted us again to the lodge, and by the point we received in, sheets of wind and rain had been blowing by means of Omaanda’s open verandas. 

One phrase for desert in Hindi, my first language, is marū, which has an etymological hyperlink to English phrases like mortal and mortality. The desert is an abode of demise, but I used to be about to find a stunning irony: touring by means of this place, I’d change into conscious of the weather of life and survival as by no means earlier than.

The following day we flew north from Windhoek to the Hoanib River Valley. As we boarded the primary of many Cessnas, our pilot, Carien Radcliffe, a no-nonsense lady with short-cropped blond hair, warned my husband to watch out of the crimson knob subsequent to his knee. “It’s crimson for a motive,” she mentioned sternly. 

Setting off on the two-hour journey, I adopted the shadow of the aircraft as we flew over the Erongo Mountains, passing valleys of parched crimson sand laced with ribbons of greenery the place riverbeds had run dry. I discovered that the Hoanib River Valley was considered one of these dried-out riverbeds—an underground vein of moisture that supported life, even within the absence of operating water. The creatures for whom it was a lifeline existed within the hope that it might in the future stream once more, as did the folks round it.

Radcliffe introduced us down easily on an unpaved touchdown strip amid camel thorn and euphorbia timber, their foliage scorched by the weather. We had been met by a information named Ramon Coetzee, a severe man with a bandanna round his neck. Turek greeted him warmly, bringing out prints of {a photograph} of him he’d taken on a earlier go to. 

In a pavilion close to the strip, a eating desk had been arrange. As we ate a lunch of fried rooster, pasta, and salad, Coetzee advised me his household was from South Africa, which had dominated Namibia from 1915 till 1990, when apartheid started to be dismantled. He got here from a diamond-rich space close to the Orange River, which kinds the border between the 2 international locations. Within the Nineteen Seventies, his household had been forcibly evicted by the apartheid regime and “dropped,” as he put it, in Namibia’s Damaraland, not removed from the place we stood. 

“How’s the drought?” Turek requested as Coetzee drove us towards Pure Choice’s Hoanib Valley Camp, the place we had been to spend the subsequent three nights. The rain that we had seen within the south had not adopted us, and it was painful to look at Coetzee search the barren lid of the sky, grey and obtrusive, for indicators that the area’s seven-year drought may lastly come to an finish. This a part of the Hoanib River Valley is fortunate to get two inches of rain a yr, he mentioned. (By comparability, New York Metropolis, the place I reside, receives a median of fifty inches.) 

Over the course of that two-hour drive to the lodge, I started to grasp the which means of the time period “desert-adapted” as an iron regulation binding man, beast, and plant collectively in a cycle of deprivation. Right here, no shred of foliage, no morsel of protein, no trace of moisture was too slight to be ignored. 

This a part of northern Namibia is sparsely populated by the Himba, a semi-nomadic individuals who reside in domed huts created from clay and wooden. They use a combination of butterfat and crimson ocher to guard their pores and skin from the cruel local weather. Coetzee stopped at a mopane tree and defined that the Himba use the wooden for fires and to construct their huts. The leaves of the mopane nourish a multicolored caterpillar, which the Himba eat. A couple of minutes later he stopped once more, this time to indicate me a Namibian myrrh plant, which the Himba use for his or her smoke baths. (Water, he defined, is just too scarce a useful resource to be squandered on typical bathing.)

As we drove on, I appeared round on the surrounding hills, which had been striated with metamorphic and volcanic rock. Then, round considered one of these hills got here a gaggle of creatures that introduced our automobile to a tough cease. “We infrequently see them,” Coetzee mentioned, his ordinary composure giving option to undisguised amazement on the sight of mountain zebras. Often known as Hartmann’s zebras, they had been skittish and delightful, smaller and browner than their counterparts on the plains, with stripes that stopped in need of their bellies. That they had foals of their midst, they usually ran on the sight of us, then stopped to look again by means of the sparse foliage. “The one us is a stallion,” Coetzee mentioned. 

We tried to observe them, however they bolted each time we approached. Coetzee advised us that lately he had seen solely zebra carcasses, so he thought they’d died out within the space from dehydration and hunger. Temporary because it was, this glimpse of the zebras was proof of the return of life to the desert.

We drove on. Once in a while, Coetzee would slam on the brakes at a wildlife sighting: a solitary ostrich daintily selecting its method over a area of quartz, or a long-faced oryx with white markings that evoked the solemnity of an African masks. We went by means of a canyon of types, then emerged into the Hoanib River Valley and arrived on the camp, the place six tents had been organized in a horseshoe formation overlooking a pure amphitheater of crimson sand and peaks of rugged rock. 

Over the subsequent few days, we noticed firsthand how the interlocking elements of desert-adapted life fall into place. After getting into the riverbed in an open jeep one morning, we discovered ourselves in an enchanted tunnel of greenery: a riverine woodland, aromatic with wild sage, shiny inexperienced mustard bush, and deep-rooted ana timber. 

Within the cool morning air, we handed herds of springbok and a solitary steenbok, who ran away utilizing a stiff-legged leaping motion that Coetzee advised us was referred to as “pronking.” We got here throughout a tusker named Arnold and his household of stern matriarchs and jelly-trunked calves. “They’re not so professional but,” Coetzee mentioned, drawing our consideration to their incapability to place their nasal appendage to prehensile use. “Typically they will journey on them and roll over.”

A couple of minutes’ drive down the riverbed, we noticed a pair of desert-adapted giraffes nibbling on the leaves of the ana timber. Nothing prepares you for the sight of those creatures within the wild. Of their gait, and in the fantastic thing about their markings, they’re essentially the most emblematic of all African creatures—what the tiger is to India. Their markings are lighter than their counterparts on the plains, which helps them slot in higher with the terrain. The taller of the pair was 5 or 6 years previous, the opposite lower than two. That they had stunning eyes with lengthy lashes that saved out the desert sand. I used to be captivated. 

We had barely handed them when a palpable sense of terror started to unfold by means of the riverbed. The springbok began operating with out motive; even the solemn-faced oryx grew skittish. A household of baboons was in a frenzy, infants scuttling this manner and that, whereas a grey go-away hen squawked raucously. One thing was amiss. 

Then, over the walkie-talkie, Coetzee received phrase that two cheetahs with a recent kill had been close by. He started to drive at breakneck velocity. We clung to the bars of the open Land Cruiser because it tore by means of the riverbed and got here finally to the spot the place a mom cheetah and her cub lay in repose. They sat on a small hillock of sand, making an exhibition of their beautiful feline magnificence; they rolled round on their backs, conserving a careless vigil over the realm. The springbok they’d killed was only some ft away, however they didn’t appear notably all in favour of it anymore. We watched them for greater than half-hour till they lastly set out throughout the broad plain, having deserted the stays of their kill, and located sanctuary within the cool of a thicket of mopane and mustard bush. We circled round and noticed the poor springbok, its abdomen torn out, an inch of blood pooling within the hole of its cover. 

It was a grim coda to the morning—a reminder of how violence was an integral a part of the stability and sweetness round us. The desert teaches solitude and survival. No residing factor is an island; every is vitally depending on the opposite, but the relationships are by necessity adversarial. Nobody can afford the luxurious of a brotherhood of fellow creatures. You reside by your nerves, otherwise you die. 

In his 2024 novel, Slaveroad, John Edgar Wideman differentiates between clock time and “nice time.” The latter is drawn from West African custom, one he likens to an ocean: “nonlinear, ever abiding, enfolding previous, current, and future.” Namibia was not about animals, nor was it finally about landscapes. If it was about something, it was about time.

This realization got here to me on the Kunene River, which kinds the border between Namibia and Angola. We had been staying at Serra Cafema, a camp run by the luxurious safari operator Wilderness. It consists of eight thatched bungalows with open decks and a bar and restaurant overlooking the swirling waters of the Kunene, past which rise the black hills of Angola. 

Drifting upriver by means of Nilotic scenes of reeds, desert, and riverine crocodiles sunning themselves on sandbanks, the wisest and most figuring out of our Namibian guides, a Himba named Stanley Kasaona, casually advised us that a number of the rock formations alongside the Kunene had been the oldest on the African Plate. They had been a part of a grouping referred to as the Epupa Metamorphic Advanced, he defined, they usually had been about 2 billion years previous.

This hit me exhausting. My father was Pakistani, my mom Indian: I had all the time been fascinated by borders. Kasaona had made good on my infantile want to have gin and tonics in Angola, reveling within the emotions of liminality it produced in me. However our information had put his finger on one thing much more necessary. Since my arrival in Namibia, I had been dropping my sense of clock time. Days, hours, and minutes appeared to merge right into a single second, whilst all sense of place was misplaced within the huge distances we lined by aircraft. I felt current as by no means earlier than, however bereft of my moorings. All of the whereas, one thing older and extra very important, that immobile ocean of deep time, had been pushing its method by means of. 

Our journey had been arrange by The Legacy Untold, a New York–primarily based tour operator that makes a degree of including a component of social accountability to its itineraries. Its founder, Mark Lakin, had despatched us to Namibia with a present of solar-powered lights for the Himba. Turek, in flip, introduced prints of pictures he had taken on his final go to of a 22-year-old Himba lady named Ohunguhanga. He gave them to her as we had been leaving Hoanib, which prompted a lot pleasure and laughter. 

To have a motive to work together with the Himba put my thoughts comfy. When Germany dominated this a part of Africa, from 1884 till 1915, there have been ugly episodes during which human beings had been placed on show. In 1896, the Herero folks, cousins of the Himba, had been paraded earlier than European onlookers on the Berlin Colonial Present. These reveals had been a prelude to genocidal violence in Namibia, which housed the primary German labor camps. Probably the most infamous of those was Shark Island, on the southern coast of Namibia, mentioned to be the world’s first demise camp, the place compelled labor, starvation, and publicity had been used to exterminate the nation’s Indigenous inhabitants. Between 1904 and 1908, greater than 80 % of Namibia’s Herero inhabitants was worn out, together with round half of the Nama. 

My fears about intruding on the Himbas had been, because it turned out, unfounded: Kasaona had made certain of that. He had lately barred vacationers from visiting his personal village, however he felt the lights had been a helpful and welcome present, permitting kids to check at evening and girls to return house safely after darkish. “We attempt to make their lives simpler,” he mentioned as we drove to a village close to Serra Cafema, “however to not change their lives.” 

We drove to a gaggle of domed huts fabricated from clay, ash, and wooden, organized in a circle. Quickly, ladies began appearing from inside. They had been bare-breasted, lined in amulets and necklaces, and their hair was dreaded with the identical combination of butterfat and ocher that had turned their pores and skin a burnt umber. The matriarch of the tribe stylishly smoked a pipe. 

The identify Himba means impoverished, or destitute, and the group acquired it after a sequence of raids by their neighbors drove them, empty-handed, into Angola within the mid nineteenth century. Cattle are sacred to the Himba. All of the huts within the village had been centered across the kraal, or cattle enclosure, which confronted the rising solar. Between the village head’s hut and the kraal was the sacred fireplace, which I used to be fascinated to examine in David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen’s 2010 e-book, The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide. The primary severe rupture between the Germans and the Herero occurred when a German official’s camel handed between a chief’s villa and the holy fireplace—a horrible omen. 

We had been all quickly caught up within the enjoyable of blowing up inflatable casings for the lights and enjoying with the switches, which turned the white lights shiny, then brighter, then flashing. Kasaona would sometimes level out facets of Himba apparel and customs. The ladies, for example, all had 4 of their decrease enamel knocked out as kids—an indication that they belonged to the tribe. Virgins wore thick beaded collars round their necks; leaving an ankle unadorned, because the matriarch did, was an indication of getting misplaced a mum or dad. 

Kasaona defined that the hunt to seek out meals for the cattle had pushed the Himba males excessive into the flat-topped mountains. Aside from the presence of 1 grownup man, the village felt virtually like a matriarchal society. 

The village was surrounded by ferric dunes, which have iron filings within the sand, their rust shade produced by steel oxidized by wind and time. I assumed once more of Turek’s concept of Namibia not being about animals, however landscapes, and I immediately understood why: these landscapes are a method of focusing the spirit, of bringing your self again in contact with the true nature of issues. 

The primary time I came across the concept of the desert as a non secular useful resource was just a few years in the past, on the sting of the Sahara in southern Morocco. I used to be chasing down the shrines of saints, or seers: individuals who had, in tradition after tradition, from the Prophet Muhammad to Jim Morrison, sought out the desert to change into conscious of the presence of absence. 

One afternoon, in a verdant walled backyard, the proprietor of my resort had pointed me to a easy picket door. On opening it, I used to be confronted by the Sahara’s immense, undulating ocean of sand and the architectural perfection of its dunes. At that second, I understood how, by framing vacancy, the desert can function a focus for meditation, a resting place for the spirit. 

This consciousness had been with me all through the journey, however at our ultimate vacation spot, deep within the Namib Desert, it got here to a sort of fruition. We had completed as we started, within the trusted fingers of Radcliffe and her Cessna 250. From the air, the russet sand of the desert was seen past a humpbacked barrier of grey rock, as distinct as a shoreline. I had grown accustomed to Namibia’s secret enclaves of moisture, however on this place there have been fewer invisible rivers, so the greenery turned pinpoints on a canvas of crimson and gold. 

If Omaanda was savanna, Hoanib semi-arid, and Serra Cafema a desert with a personal Nile operating by means of it, then Sossusvlei—the final cease on our Namibian journey—was the desert in all its pitiless glory. There each tree, each animal, each suggestion of moisture stood in sharp reduction towards a unadorned expanse of strong rock. Shale, granite, dolerite, sandstone, and mica schist confirmed pink, beige, chocolate, and crimson, relying on the place of the solar. 

We had been staying at Sossusvlei Desert Lodge, a property run by the safari operator andBeyond. It was made up of bungalows of concrete, stone, and wrought iron embedded within the desert hills, insisting we ponder the void. The sight of Hartmann zebras, oryxes, and a pair of mating ostriches making their method throughout the beige plain because the solar shone excessive overhead stuffed us with pity at their plight. At dinner a jackal, smelling oryx steak, got here proper as much as our desk and appeared with soft-eyed longing on the meals, like a beloved pet. 

The whole lot spoke of solitude. I felt the facility of the desert as one thing that hollowed you out from inside, forcing you to rethink all the pieces you’ve taken as a right. The silence, the recent wind, the oceans of sand that but supported life—these components caused a philosophical reckoning. Within the haunting warmth on the finish of day, I wished to breathe within the dolerite-strewn hills, glistening black with enameled rock, the camel thorn tree casting inky shadows and the hills grading into the chalky pink of a paper rose.

We took a hot-air balloon trip at daybreak and climbed an enormous dune referred to as “Massive Daddy.” We wandered by means of essentially the most Instagrammable of Namibian websites, Deadvlei: a forest of petrified camel thorn timber surrounded by dunes of sentimental crimson sand. 

In these first few days of the brand new yr, with Los Angeles burning on our telephones, the traditional desert made all issues human appear insignificant. There, it was simple to wind the clock again to a time earlier than males encumbered the earth with their presence. But that detachment itself was exhausting, when a lot of what we cherished felt imperiled. 

On our final night, we had stopped at far from a shepherd’s tree rising out of a pile of boulders. On the reddening plain, we noticed oryx and jackals, burnished copper by the setting solar, gazing arrestingly out at us. I appeared on the silhouettes of a ziggurat-shaped hill and felt one thing akin to laughter stand up in me. We stood in a spot of excellent paradox, the place demise was all the time close to, but life turned amplified, urging us to treasure it as by no means earlier than. We had been emptied out, but by some means full. 

The good Sri Lankan artwork historian Ananda Coomaraswamy as soon as wrote that our egos are destroyed “by the hearth of the concept of the abyss.” It’s a state devoutly to be wished for, but it surely calls for give up. Gazing out on the nice expanse of the barren plain, watching the westering solar like an extinct star on the horizon, I let this all-emptying plenitude wash over me one final time, fearing that when we had returned to our lives within the drained world past, I’d by no means be capable of seize it once more. 

A model of this story first appeared within the November 2025 problem of Journey + Leisure below the headline “Dune Awakening.”