Namibia

One of the wildest trips I have made. Eighteen days across Namibia by four-wheel drive, from Etosha National Park to the Namib Desert, where the road ends and the landscape begins.

I set off from Windhoek, the quietest capital in Africa, tidy, with German colonial architecture and craft breweries. The first stop was Etosha National Park, one of the largest wildlife reserves in southern Africa. Three days among the camps of Namutoni, Halali and Okaukuejo, on dirt tracks between the savanna and the great salt pan, a white expanse where in winter thousands of animals gather at the waterholes. Elephants, giraffes, lions, black rhinos, zebras, wildebeest, springbok, often a few metres from the car. At night, at the floodlit waterhole of Okaukuejo, I saw rhinos come to drink under the stars.

From the park I went north into Kaokoland, the most remote and least developed region of Namibia. At Ruacana, on the Angolan border, I saw the waterfalls (often dry in winter) and a landscape of bare rock. Then the Epupa Falls on the Kunene River: rapids and drops among makalani palms, again on the Angolan border. At sunset I saw the mist above the falls turn red.

Opuwo, the "capital" of Kaokoland, is where the modern world meets the culture of the Himba, one of the most photographed peoples in Africa. The women cover their bodies in a paste of red ochre and butter.

On the way down to the coast I crossed Damaraland. At Twyfelfontein, a UNESCO site, I saw rock engravings six thousand years old left by the San (Bushmen): giraffes, rhinos, human footprints cut into the red sandstone. At Palmwag live the desert elephants, adapted to drought. Spitzkoppe is a granite inselberg that rises from the desert like a pyramid, the "Matterhorn of Namibia", with rock arches and colours that change with the light.

Then the Skeleton Coast. At Cape Cross I saw the largest Cape fur seal colony in southern Africa: thousands of animals packed on the beach, with a very strong noise and smell. Swakopmund is a German colonial town in the middle of the desert, with breweries, cafés serving Black Forest cake, Jugendstil architecture and the cold Atlantic wind. I spent three days here, with a 4x4 excursion to Sandwich Harbour, where the world's tallest dunes drop straight into the ocean.

I spent the last part of the trip in the Namib, among the oldest deserts on the planet (80 million years). Solitaire is a ghost village with a petrol pump and Namibia's best apple pie. Sesriem is the gateway to Sossusvlei. I woke up at 4 a.m. to be on Dune 45 at dawn: a wall of apricot-coloured sand 170 metres high against an indigo sky, with the shadows drawing geometric patterns. Then Sossusvlei and Deadvlei: the white floor of a dried-up pan with the black skeletons of acacia trees dead for 900 years, among orange dunes and a cobalt-blue sky.