Namibia

When you think of the boundless spaces of wildest Africa and ancient deserts that open up as far as the eye can see in dunes of surreal colours, then you are undoubtedly thinking of Namibia.

A country that boasts numerous records, including having the world’s oldest desert, the highest concentration of cheetahs and rhinos in the wild, and the first people to settle in Southern Africa, the Bushmen.

There are many adventures and sceneries that enchant and excite travellers in this extraordinary land, arid and desert, apparently inhospitable, that stretches between endless savannahs and expanses of sand with colour gradations as red as fire, demonstrating its ancient formation.

As you leave the modern capital, Windhoek, with its Herero Ladies, the flashy ladies dressed in Victorian colonial style, the landscapes fade into increasingly arid areas, immense lands where little or nothing grows and where animal species have developed the ability to adapt to a practically non-existent vegetation. The Etosha Park and the stone hills of Damarland offer the most adrenaline-filled sightings, with a miraculous number of “desert elephants”, cheetahs, lions, rhinos, antelopes, giraffes and numerous other species populating these surreal scenarios, rich in mineral salts in the large salt ponds.

But excitement in Namibia is a constant that accompanies whichever itinerary you decide to follow, from the remote aridity of the Kalahari desert, land of the ancient Bushmen, custodians of an extreme life that offers them the bare essentials to survive, to the barren profiles of the Kaokoland massif, where the Himba women dye their long hair and skin orange, with a mixture of fat, grasses and ochre, the same colour as the majestic dunes of the world’s oldest desert, the Namib, which plunges directly into the ocean, opening up a gap between the endless sandbar of Sossusvlei, the petrified acacias and the thermal fog that envelops everything, allowing the survival of the beautiful oryx, in one of the most evocative spectacles in the world. A contrast of colours and scenery everywhere, from the ghostly wrecks of the Skeleton Coast to the epic Fish River Canyon, and where the ultimate wonder is to find a small branch of the German Rhine, in the town of Swakopmund in Walvis Bay, where sociable and polite sea lions flock to the beach to greet visitors.