Namibia
-
John and Jean from Kent travelled to Namibia
Hi Bill, we had an amazing trip! All the lodges/hotels were great with perfect staff. The tour you booked for us at Swakop was very good. Berger did a great job and full of stories. We saw lots of seals and jackals and had a very exciting ride back over the dunes. Seeing it all from a scenic flight gave a different perspective. Caesar gave us an unbelievable trip all the way up to the Kunene River. Lots of kilometres but such wonderful sites to visit. We tracked but didn’t see the lion. Lots of elephants and antelope and herds of zebra racing the land cruiser across an enormous open plain! Huab was a welcome rest and we drank our wine while lazing in the hot spring. Not much large game around now but plenty of smaller interest. At Ongava we saw 3 prides of lion (about 22 in total) and actually walked through the bush to follow a female white rhino and her calf. Wow! Two black rhinos visited the waterhole in front of the lodge every evening! Etosha was excellent. Lots happening! The highlights were a lion stalking very large herds of game at Salvadora waterhole and a group of 12 elephants bathing at Klein Namutoni. It was good spending 2 nights at Okonjima. So much to do! lots of cheetah and leopard to track with great sightings. We were also fortunate to find the two wild dogs and to see porcupine from the night hide. The visit to the San bushmen at Bagatelle was well done – and we met quite a few colourful Himba people up in Damaraland. We even saw an aardvark at Bagatelle on a night drive. The roads were not as rutted as we expected but the road in and out of Twyfelfontein was very badly corrugated. The smaller Duster was fine but perhaps a bigger 4×4 would give a bit more confident and a smoother ride. Thanks Bill for organising such a great trip. We really loved it.
Namibia
Regions
The Caprivi Strip
The Caprivi Strip is that finger of north-east Namibia which stretches eastwards and is sandwiched between Angola/Zambia in the north, and Botswana in the south. The habitat is completely different to the rest of Namibia and is largely influenced by the four major rivers which form the boundaries or bisect it – the Zambezi, Chobe, Kwando and Okavango. Mahango, Babatwa, Mudumu and Mamili national parks are far more like the wildlife areas of Botswana, though in terms of wildlife, they are the ‘poorer relations’. The exception is possibly a small area of land at the eastern end of the Babatwa National Park, where an upmarket safari lodge can be visited and there are reasonable populations of big game.
Excellent birding and fishing can be found throughout the Caprivi, especially in the far east where Katimo Mulilo offers access to the Zambezi River and Impalila Island to the Chobe River. There are a couple of excellent lodges on Impalila Island which are most easily accessed from Kasane (Botswana) and often used as an alternative to the busy mainstream safari lodges found in Botswana’s Chobe National Park.