Travel Guide: Namibia

Namibia's many parks and game reserves are of 2 basic types. Some, such as the well-known Etosha National Park, are like most southern African parks, focused primarily on game. Others, including the coastal parks and Fish River Canyon, are are spectacular wilderness areas, where the beauty of the scenery easily upstages the game. The descriptions that follow are for only a selected few of Namibia's many fine parks.

Places of interest

Etosha National Park:

Etosha is Namibia's premier big game park, comparable in size and diversity of species to any other reserve on the continent. It is especially renowned for its abundant population of Elephants, though in fact it contains sizeable populations of an enormous variety of species. Many different Antelope species, including Gemsbok, Impala, Dik-dik, Springbok, Eland, Kudu, and Duiker, are here, as are Wildebeest, Hartebeest, and Zebra. Lion, Leopard, and Cheetah are also found in Etosha, and Giraffe and Rhino as well.

What draws all of these creatures to Etosha is water. At the center of Etosha National Park is the enormous shallow bowl of the Etosha Pan, a depression that was once a lakebed. Although the pan does fill with water during periods of unusually heavy rainfall, the watersource on which the wildlife depend is a series of underground springs that dot the pan's perimeter. If you visit between May and September, when the pan is quite dry, the temperature cool, and the wildlife thirsty, the contrast between the barren landscape and the concentration of animals can be stunning.

The Parks and Reserves of the Caprivi Strip:

The narrow corridor of the Caprivi Strip is the locale of several smaller parks and game reserves. The attraction of these parks is that they permit open-vehicle drives as well as walking, but the tragedy is that their wildlife populations have suffered enormously from poaching. Recovery does seem to be proceeding rapidly, but at present the appeal of the Caprivi parks really rests upon the fact that they are both uncrowded and open to intimate exploration on foot or by boat.