The landscapes of Namibia are "monumental" in scale. You can drive across the country's wilderness areas for hours without passing another vehicle, and yet, in recent years, "incredible" lodges have opened in some of its most remote corners. My husband and I chose a road trip around Namibia as our first "long-haul family trip", said Gemma Bowes in The Times.
It proved to be just the sort of "big adventure" we'd been hoping for. On a ten-day loop from the capital city, Windhoek, we covered about a thousand miles, and only once found ourselves driving after dark (something to avoid as animals often lie on the "sun-warmed" roads at night). At Dead Valley Lodge, we watched the towering dunes of Sossusvlei change colour at sunrise – "crimson, straw and dried apricot" – and the children ran barefoot across them, "leaping and sliding" in sand "as soft as powdered milk".
Nearby lies Dead Vlei, the "ghost" of an ancient lake in whose "jigsaw-cracked" mud the skeletal remains of millennia-old trees still stand, having been charred by the sun before they could decompose. At Okonjima, we were transfixed for 20 "magical" minutes by the sight of a leopard stalking a herd of antelope; and at Kwessi Dunes, we saw ostriches, zebra, and oryx with "theatrical spiral horns", and at night gazed through a telescope at the Milky Way, which appeared as bright as "strip lighting".
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The "sea-misted" town of Swakopmund provided a "surreal" interlude, with its bierkellers and Bavarian-style architecture – a legacy of German colonial rule. From there, we drove to Damaraland, passing stalls run by Himba women, their bodies painted in red ochre, and Herero women in floor-length gowns. In the region's rocky desert, we spotted elephant and giraffe, but equally "fascinating" was the Damara Living Museum, where local people demonstrate ancient hunter-gatherer traditions, and explain them in the click language of Khoekhoe.
Expert Africa (expertafrica.com) has a ten-night trip from £11,168 for a family of four.
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