Ancient deserts, wilderness and remarkable desert-adapted wildlife
Namibia is a vast, empty and extraordinary country — twice the size of California, four times the size of the UK, but home to just a few million people, giving it one of the lowest population densities on earth. It’s a place of ancient deserts, dramatic table-top mountains and wildlife that has adapted to survive conditions found almost nowhere else on the planet.
As with Costa Rica and Baja California, we wanted a local partner in Namibia we could genuinely trust with our guests before adding it to our list of destinations. We found that in Ultimate Earth, a Namibian-owned conservation travel company founded in 2008. Their guiding team brings over a century of combined experience in the Namibian safari industry, and — because they aren’t tied to any particular lodge or camp group — they’re free to recommend whichever properties genuinely suit you, rather than whichever ones they have a relationship with. They’re also deeply invested in the country’s conservation story, which matters to us as much as it does to them.
“Namib” — from the Nama language, meaning “an area where there is nothing. One of the world’s last wildernesses.”
We’ve put together three suggested itineraries with our local partner, two nine-day guided safaris and one twelve day flying safari, visiting pristine landscapes with stunning aerial views of shipwrecks, endless desert vistas and the feeling of visiting one of the last untouched wilderness areas in the world. These are simply to show you some of the possible ways you could experience Namibia, but every trip can be tailored to your needs with extensions at the start and end of the safari — please get in touch to talk through the options.
You might want to search for desert-adapted elephant and track endangered black rhino alongside Save the Rhino Trust rangers. Or climb the towering sand dunes of Sossusvlei before the heat of the day sets in.
Or you can experience sea kayaking with seals and dolphins on the Skeleton Coast, followed by visit to the UNESCO World Heritage rock art site at Twyfelfontein, and a stay inside the world’s fourth-largest national park.
Contact us to find out more!
Namibia sits on Africa’s south-west coast, bordered by the Atlantic on one side and the Kalahari on the other. It’s one of the least densely populated countries on earth, and that emptiness is central to what makes it special — vast open landscapes, huge night skies, and the sense of a country that has barely been touched.
It’s also an extraordinarily old landscape. There’s rock art here created by stone-age artists, and a petrified forest where fossilised tree trunks have lain for over 280 million years. Namibia’s climate is typical of a semi-desert country: warm to hot days, cool nights, and very little rain for most of the year, tempered by the high interior plateau and the cold Benguela Current running along the Atlantic coast.
What draws most of our guests, though, is the wildlife — and specifically, wildlife that exists almost nowhere else. Namibia is home to desert-adapted elephant and black rhino, animals that have learned to survive on a fraction of the water and vegetation their counterparts elsewhere in Africa would need. Sightings are never guaranteed — this is genuinely wild, unfenced country, and finding these animals is part of the adventure — but the areas we visit with Ultimate Earth are chosen specifically because they give guests a real chance of it.
The Namib Desert, which gives the country its name, is generally considered the oldest desert on earth — estimates put its age at somewhere between 55 and 80 million years.
Namibia covers around 824,000 square kilometres but has a population of only around 3 million, making it one of the least densely populated countries in the world.
Etosha National Park covers 22,270 square kilometres, making it one of the largest national parks in Africa. The Fish River Canyon in the south of the country is the second-largest canyon in the world, after the Grand Canyon.
Namibia is also home to the largest free-roaming population of black rhino left in Africa, and reportedly the highest density of cheetah anywhere in the world. Its desert-adapted elephants share their unusual survival strategy with only one other elephant population on earth, in Mali.
The dry season, from roughly May to October, is generally considered the best time for wildlife viewing. As the bush dries out and natural water sources disappear, animals concentrate around Etosha’s permanent waterholes, which makes sightings more predictable.
The wet season, November to April, brings afternoon thunderstorms, green landscapes and dispersed wildlife — animals have less need to gather at waterholes when water is more widely available, so game viewing in Etosha in particular can be harder going. That said, it’s a beautiful time to see the desert areas, when there’s any rain at all to be had.
The desert regions — Sossusvlei, Damaraland, the Skeleton Coast — are arid enough that they’re worth visiting more or less year-round, regardless of season.
Namibia’s climate is shaped by its geography: a high interior plateau, a cold ocean current along the coast, and a large expanse of desert. Inland, expect warm to hot days and notably cool nights, even in summer. Along the coast, the cold Benguela Current keeps temperatures milder and often brings in fog, particularly around Swakopmund.
Most of the country’s limited rainfall falls between January and April. Outside of that window, Namibia is generally dry.
Namibia’s landscapes shift dramatically as you move across the country. The Namib Desert runs the length of the Atlantic coastline and is home to Sossusvlei, where wind-sculpted dunes rise up to 300 metres — among the tallest in the world — in shades of apricot and deep orange. Nearby, Deadvlei is a stark white clay pan scattered with the skeletons of camel thorn trees that died for want of water roughly 900 years ago and never decomposed in the dry air.
Further north, Damaraland is a very different world: table-topped mountains, dramatic rock formations and gravel plains, shaped over millions of years by wind and water. It’s also one of the few places on earth where you’ll find elephant, rhino and even lion surviving in genuine desert conditions.
The Skeleton Coast, where the Namib Desert meets the cold Atlantic, is named for the shipwrecks and whale bones that once littered its fog-bound shores. And in the north, Etosha Pan — a vast, shimmering salt pan visible from space — anchors one of Africa’s great wildlife areas.
One of Africa’s largest national parks, built around a colossal salt pan. Wildlife concentrates around its waterholes, particularly in the dry season, making it one of the more reliable places in Africa for sightings of elephant, lion, rhino and a huge range of plains game and birdlife.
Home to the towering dunes of Sossusvlei and the ghostly clay pan of Deadvlei, within the Great Namib Sand Sea, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Namibia’s first UNESCO World Heritage Site, protecting one of the largest and best-preserved collections of rock engravings in Africa, some thousands of years old.
A remote, fog-bound stretch of Atlantic coastline, known for its shipwrecks, seal colonies and stark desert-meets-ocean scenery.
A 24,000-hectare private conservancy where Ultimate Earth has spent over a decade reversing decades of inappropriate farming — removing internal fencing, restoring watering points and reintroducing wildlife historically found there. It’s now home to healthy populations of oryx, zebra, giraffe and predators including leopard and cheetah.
A community conservation area and a core habitat for desert-adapted black rhino and elephant, where Ultimate Earth works directly with Save the Rhino Trust’s ranger teams.
Ultimate Earth is a Namibian-owned conservation travel company, founded in 2008 and based in Windhoek. Their guiding team brings well over a hundred years of combined experience in the Namibian safari industry, and they own and maintain their own fleet of specially adapted 4×4 safari vehicles — built specifically for Namibian conditions.
Importantly, Ultimate Earth isn’t affiliated with any particular lodge or camp group, which means their recommendations are genuinely unbiased — they’re free to choose whichever properties are the best fit for each guest, rather than whichever ones they have a commercial tie to.
Conservation sits at the centre of what they do. Ultimate Earth raises an additional 2.5% of their commercial revenue for conservation projects through their own Conservation Travel Foundation, supporting initiatives that range from Save the Rhino Trust and the Desert Lion Project to the Giraffe Conservation Foundation and the AfriCat Foundation, as well as community projects like the upgrade of Grootberg Primary School in a remote rural area. They’ve also funded the construction of anti-poaching camps in Damaraland and helped finance the collaring of desert-adapted giraffe and lion for ongoing research.
In short, they share the same philosophy we do: that the places and people at the heart of these trips deserve to benefit from them, not just the guests who visit.
We listen to you. We take the time to understand what you want your trip of a lifetime to be. We then we use our decades of experience and local partners to make it happen.
