Namibia Has Some of Africa’s Best Landscapes and Lodges

It rained on my first evening in Namibia, well before I was in a position to appreciate the auspicious beauty of such an event. My husband, Ryan, and I were with the photographer Michael Turek at Zannier Omaanda, a lodge outside the capital of Windhoek. We were at the beginning of a three-part journey through a country that is larger than Texas but has a population smaller than that of Connecticut—some 3 million. The three of us were to fly north by Cessna to the Hoanib Valley, then farther north to the Kunene River, on the Angolan border, before flying back south to the Namib Desert, one of the oldest in the world. 

Omaanda, which is set on 35 square miles of savanna, was meant to be a rest stop before the odyssey ahead. It was the second day of the new year, and I was exhilarated by the wildlife we saw 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 countless types of antelope, from impalas to tiny steenbok. But Turek, now on his third visit to the country, was clear. “Namibia is not about animals,” he said. “It’s about the landscapes.”

We got out of the jeep to stretch. Suddenly, thunder rumbled. Above the great arid expanse, a column of rain appeared. An African sky of many moods came into sharp relief, here lit volcanic red by the setting sun, there as clear and cloudless as a ceiling fresco in an Italian church. Then it all came together. The lava broke its bounds and engulfed the sky. The pillar of rain turned an ashen orange. I was enthralled by the drama and looked to Turek, now frantically taking photos, for confirmation. “When they bring out their phones,” he said, gesturing to our guide, Jansen Namaseb, who was taking a picture out of the open-sided safari vehicle, “you know it’s major.” 

“Greatest sunset ever,” Turek said when the light had finally died. The rain, which had been stalking us on the savanna, was now in full flow. It followed us back to the lodge, and by the time we got in, sheets of wind and rain were blowing through Omaanda’s open verandas. 

One word for desert in Hindi, my first language, is marū, which has an etymological link to English words like mortal and mortality. The desert is an abode of death, yet I was about to discover a surprising irony: traveling through this place, I would become aware of the elements of life and survival as never before.

The next day we flew north from Windhoek to the Hoanib River Valley. As we boarded the first of many Cessnas, our pilot, Carien Radcliffe, a no-nonsense woman with short-cropped blond hair, warned my husband to be careful of the red knob next to his knee. “It’s red for a reason,” she said sternly. 

Setting off on the two-hour trip, I followed the shadow of the plane as we flew over the Erongo Mountains, passing valleys of parched red sand laced with ribbons of greenery where riverbeds had run dry. I learned that the Hoanib River Valley was one of these dried-out riverbeds—an underground vein of moisture that supported life, even in the absence of running water. The creatures for whom it was a lifeline existed in the hope that it would one day flow again, as did the people around it.

Radcliffe brought us down smoothly on an unpaved landing strip amid camel thorn and euphorbia trees, their foliage scorched by the elements. We were met by a guide named Ramon Coetzee, a serious man with a bandanna around his neck. Turek greeted him warmly, bringing out prints of a photograph of him he’d taken on a previous visit. 

In a pavilion near the strip, a dining table had been set up. As we ate a lunch of fried chicken, pasta, and salad, Coetzee told me his family was from South Africa, which had ruled Namibia from 1915 until 1990, when apartheid began to be dismantled. He came from a diamond-rich area near the Orange River, which forms the border between the two countries. In the 1970s, his family had been forcibly evicted by the apartheid regime and “dropped,” as he put it, in Namibia’s Damaraland, not far from where we stood. 

“How’s the drought?” Turek asked as Coetzee drove us toward Natural Selection’s Hoanib Valley Camp, where we were to spend the next three nights. The rain that we had seen in the south had not followed us, and it was painful to watch Coetzee search the barren lid of the sky, gray and glaring, for signs that the region’s seven-year drought might finally come to an end. This part of the Hoanib River Valley is lucky to get two inches of rain a year, he said. (By comparison, New York City, where I live, receives an average of 50 inches.) 

Over the course of that two-hour drive to the lodge, I began to understand the meaning of the term “desert-adapted” as an iron law binding man, beast, and plant together in a cycle of deprivation. Here, no shred of foliage, no morsel of protein, no hint of moisture was too slight to be overlooked. 

This part of northern Namibia is sparsely populated by the Himba, a semi-nomadic people who live in domed huts made from clay and wood. They use a mixture of butterfat and red ocher to protect their skin from the harsh climate. Coetzee stopped at a mopane tree and explained that the Himba use the wood for fires and to build their huts. The leaves of the mopane nourish a multicolored caterpillar, which the Himba eat. A few minutes later he stopped again, this time to show me a Namibian myrrh plant, which the Himba use for their smoke baths. (Water, he explained, is too scarce a resource to be squandered on conventional bathing.)

As we drove on, I looked around at the surrounding hills, which were striated with metamorphic and volcanic rock. Then, around one of these hills came a group of creatures that brought our vehicle to a hard stop. “We hardly ever see them,” Coetzee said, his usual composure giving way to undisguised amazement at the sight of mountain zebras. Also known as Hartmann’s zebras, they were skittish and beautiful, smaller and browner than their counterparts on the plains, with stripes that stopped short of their bellies. They had foals in their midst, and they ran at the sight of us, then stopped to peer back through the sparse foliage. “The one looking at us is a stallion,” Coetzee said. 

We tried to follow them, but they bolted every time we approached. Coetzee told us that recently he had seen only zebra carcasses, so he thought they had died out in the area from dehydration and starvation. Brief as it was, this glimpse of the zebras was evidence of the return of life to the desert.

We drove on. Every now and then, Coetzee would slam on the brakes at a wildlife sighting: a solitary ostrich daintily picking its way over a field of quartz, or a long-faced oryx with white markings that evoked the solemnity of an African mask. We went through a canyon of sorts, then emerged into the Hoanib River Valley and arrived at the camp, where six tents were arranged in a horseshoe formation overlooking a natural amphitheater of red sand and peaks of rugged rock. 

Over the next few days, we saw firsthand how the interlocking components of desert-adapted life fall into place. After entering the riverbed in an open jeep one morning, we found ourselves in an enchanted tunnel of greenery: a riverine woodland, fragrant with wild sage, bright green mustard bush, and deep-rooted ana trees. 

In the cool morning air, we passed herds of springbok and a solitary steenbok, who ran away using a stiff-legged jumping movement that Coetzee told us was called “pronking.” We came across a tusker named Arnold and his family of stern matriarchs and jelly-trunked calves. “They’re not so expert yet,” Coetzee said, drawing our attention to their inability to put their nasal appendage to prehensile use. “Sometimes they can trip on them and roll over.”

A few minutes’ drive down the riverbed, we saw a pair of desert-adapted giraffes nibbling on the leaves of the ana trees. Nothing prepares you for the sight of these creatures in the wild. In their gait, and in the beauty of their markings, they are 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 fit in better with the terrain. The taller of the pair was five or six years old, the other less than two. They had beautiful eyes with long lashes that kept out the desert sand. I was captivated. 

We had barely passed them when a palpable sense of terror began to spread through the riverbed. The springbok started running without reason; even the solemn-faced oryx grew skittish. A family of baboons was in a frenzy, babies scuttling this way and that, while a gray go-away bird squawked raucously. Something was amiss. 

Then, over the walkie-talkie, Coetzee got word that two cheetahs with a fresh kill were nearby. He began to drive at breakneck speed. We clung to the bars of the open Land Cruiser as it tore through the riverbed and came at last to the spot where a mother cheetah and her cub lay in repose. They sat on a small hillock of sand, making an exhibition of their exquisite feline beauty; they rolled around on their backs, keeping a careless vigil over the area. The springbok they had killed was only a few feet away, but they did not seem particularly interested in it anymore. We watched them for more than 30 minutes until they finally set out across the broad plain, having abandoned the remains of their kill, and found sanctuary in the cool of a thicket of mopane and mustard bush. We circled around and saw the poor springbok, its stomach torn out, an inch of blood pooling in the hollow of its hide. 

It was a grim coda to the morning—a reminder of how violence was an integral part of the balance and beauty around us. The desert teaches solitude and survival. No living thing is an island; each is vitally dependent on the other, yet the relationships are by necessity adversarial. No one can afford the luxury of a brotherhood of fellow creatures. You live by your nerves, or you die. 

In his 2024 novel, Slaveroad, John Edgar Wideman differentiates between clock time and “great time.” The latter is drawn from West African tradition, one he likens to an ocean: “nonlinear, ever abiding, enfolding past, present, and future.” Namibia was not about animals, nor was it ultimately about landscapes. If it was about anything, it was about time.

This realization came to me on the Kunene River, which forms the border between Namibia and Angola. We were staying at Serra Cafema, a camp run by the luxury safari operator Wilderness. It consists of eight thatched bungalows with open decks and a bar and restaurant overlooking the swirling waters of the Kunene, beyond which rise the black hills of Angola. 

Drifting upriver through Nilotic scenes of reeds, desert, and riverine crocodiles sunning themselves on sandbanks, the wisest and most knowing of our Namibian guides, a Himba named Stanley Kasaona, casually told us that some of the rock formations along the Kunene were the oldest on the African Plate. They were part of a grouping called the Epupa Metamorphic Complex, he explained, and they were about 2 billion years old.

This hit me hard. My father was Pakistani, my mother Indian: I had always been fascinated by borders. Kasaona had made good on my childish wish to have gin and tonics in Angola, reveling in the feelings of liminality it produced in me. But our guide had put his finger on something far more important. Since my arrival in Namibia, I had been losing my sense of clock time. Days, hours, and minutes seemed to merge into a single moment, even as all sense of place was lost in the vast distances we covered by plane. I felt present as never before, but bereft of my moorings. All the while, something older and more vital, that motionless ocean of deep time, had been pushing its way through. 

Our trip had been set up by The Legacy Untold, a New York–based tour operator that makes a point of adding an element of social responsibility to its itineraries. Its founder, Mark Lakin, had sent us to Namibia with a gift of solar-powered lights for the Himba. Turek, in turn, brought prints of photographs he had taken on his last visit of a 22-year-old Himba woman named Ohunguhanga. He gave them to her as we were leaving Hoanib, which caused much joy and laughter. 

To have a reason to interact with the Himba put my mind at ease. When Germany ruled this part of Africa, from 1884 until 1915, there were ugly episodes in which human beings were put on display. In 1896, the Herero people, cousins of the Himba, were paraded before European onlookers at the Berlin Colonial Show. These shows were a prelude to genocidal violence in Namibia, which housed the first German labor camps. The most notorious of these was Shark Island, on the southern coast of Namibia, said to be the world’s first death camp, where forced labor, hunger, and exposure were used to exterminate the country’s Indigenous population. Between 1904 and 1908, more than 80 percent of Namibia’s Herero population was wiped out, along with around half of the Nama. 

My fears about intruding on the Himbas were, as it turned out, unfounded: Kasaona had made sure of that. He had recently barred tourists from visiting his own village, but he felt the lights were a useful and welcome gift, allowing children to study at night and women to return home safely after dark. “We try to make their lives easier,” he said as we drove to a village near Serra Cafema, “but not to change their lives.” 

We drove to a group of domed huts made of clay, ash, and wood, arranged in a circle. Soon, women began to appear from inside. They were bare-breasted, covered in amulets and necklaces, and their hair was dreaded with the same mixture of butterfat and ocher that had turned their skin a burnt umber. The matriarch of the tribe stylishly smoked a pipe. 

The name Himba means impoverished, or destitute, and the community acquired it after a series of raids by their neighbors drove them, empty-handed, into Angola in the mid 19th century. Cattle are sacred to the Himba. All the huts in the village were centered around the kraal, or cattle enclosure, which faced the rising sun. Between the village head’s hut and the kraal was the sacred fire, which I was fascinated to read about in David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen’s 2010 book, The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide. The first serious rupture between the Germans and the Herero occurred when a German official’s camel passed between a chief’s villa and the holy fire—a terrible omen. 

We were all soon caught up in the fun of blowing up inflatable casings for the lights and playing with the switches, which turned the white lights bright, then brighter, then flashing. Kasaona would occasionally point out aspects of Himba attire and customs. The women, for instance, all had four of their lower teeth knocked out as children—a sign that they belonged to the tribe. Virgins wore thick beaded collars around their necks; leaving an ankle unadorned, as the matriarch did, was a sign of having lost a parent. 

Kasaona explained that the quest to find food for the cattle had driven the Himba men high into the flat-topped mountains. Except for the presence of one adult man, the village felt almost like a matriarchal society. 

The village was surrounded by ferric dunes, which have iron filings in the sand, their rust color produced by metal oxidized by wind and time. I thought again of Turek’s idea of Namibia not being about animals, but landscapes, and I suddenly understood why: those landscapes are a way of focusing the spirit, of bringing yourself back in touch with the true nature of things. 

The first time I came upon the idea of the desert as a spiritual resource was a few years ago, on the edge of the Sahara in southern Morocco. I was chasing down the shrines of saints, or seers: people who had, in culture after culture, from the Prophet Muhammad to Jim Morrison, sought out the desert to become aware of the presence of absence. 

One afternoon, in a verdant walled garden, the owner of my hotel had pointed me to a simple wooden door. On opening it, I was confronted by the Sahara’s immense, undulating ocean of sand and the architectural perfection of its dunes. At that moment, I understood how, by framing emptiness, the desert can serve as a focal point for meditation, a resting place for the spirit. 

This awareness had been with me throughout the trip, but at our final destination, deep in the Namib Desert, it came to a kind of fruition. We had finished as we began, in the trusted hands of Radcliffe and her Cessna 250. From the air, the russet sand of the desert was visible beyond a humpbacked barrier of gray rock, as distinct as a shoreline. I had grown accustomed to Namibia’s secret enclaves of moisture, but in this place there were fewer invisible rivers, so the greenery became pinpoints on a canvas of red and gold. 

If Omaanda was savanna, Hoanib semi-arid, and Serra Cafema a desert with a private Nile running through it, then Sossusvlei—the last stop on our Namibian journey—was the desert in all its pitiless glory. There every tree, every animal, every suggestion of moisture stood in sharp relief against a naked expanse of solid rock. Shale, granite, dolerite, sandstone, and mica schist showed pink, beige, chocolate, and red, depending on the position of the sun. 

We were 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 in the desert hills, insisting we contemplate the void. The sight of Hartmann zebras, oryxes, and a pair of mating ostriches making their way across the beige plain as the sun shone high overhead filled us with pity at their plight. At dinner a jackal, smelling oryx steak, came right up to our table and looked with soft-eyed longing at the food, like a beloved pet. 

Everything spoke of solitude. I felt the power of the desert as something that hollowed you out from within, forcing you to reconsider everything you’ve taken for granted. The silence, the hot wind, the oceans of sand that yet supported life—these elements brought about a philosophical reckoning. In the haunting heat at the end of day, I wanted to breathe in 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 ride at dawn and climbed a vast dune called “Big Daddy.” We wandered through the most Instagrammable of Namibian sites, Deadvlei: a forest of petrified camel thorn trees surrounded by dunes of soft red sand. 

In these first few days of the new year, with Los Angeles burning on our phones, the ancient desert made all things human seem insignificant. There, it was easy to wind the clock back to a time before men encumbered the earth with their presence. Yet that detachment itself was hard, when so much of what we cherished felt imperiled. 

On our last evening, we had stopped at some distance from a shepherd’s tree growing out of a pile of boulders. On the reddening plain, we saw oryx and jackals, burnished copper by the setting sun, gazing arrestingly out at us. I looked at the silhouettes of a ziggurat-shaped hill and felt something akin to laughter rise up in me. We stood in a place of perfect paradox, where death was always near, yet life became amplified, urging us to treasure it as never before. We were emptied out, yet somehow full. 

The great Sri Lankan art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy once wrote that our egos are destroyed “by the fire of the idea of the abyss.” It is a state devoutly to be wished for, but it demands surrender. Gazing out at the great expanse of the barren plain, watching the westering sun like an extinct star on the horizon, I let this all-emptying plenitude wash over me one last time, fearing that once we had returned to our lives in the tired world beyond, I would never be able to seize it again. 

A version of this story first appeared in the November 2025 issue of Travel + Leisure under the headline “Dune Awakening.”