Namibia Tours Top Four National Parks

Potential Namibia tours should include at least one of these four national parks to fully experience what this beautiful country has to offer.

It won't be a safari in the conventional sense but in terms of unique fauna and flora you will have to go a long way to beat this...

1. Etosha National Park

This is arguably one of the best national parks in Africa for spotting wildlife and the reason for this is water, or in this case the lack of it. During the dry season there is no water for miles around except for a few natural waterholes and some artificially fed by boreholes.

This means that all the animals have to eventually visit these areas or die of thirst so if you position yourself near one you have a good chance of seeing, lion, elephant, rhino, cheetah and many different types of antelope.

There are floodlit waterholes at most of the camps in the park which effectively means you don't really have to drive around to see game.

The dry conditions also mean there is much less vegetation to obscure your vision and so wildlife spotting is a cinch.

During the wet season the pan fills up with water and attracts thousands of flamingos to feed on the algae and the game begins to spread out but viewing conditions are still good.

The rainy season stretches from January to March and the driest months are July to September.

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2. Namib Naukluft National Park Namibia Tours

This park plays host to some of the most famous and largest sand dunes in the world at Sossusvlei and the canyon at Sesriem.

One of the major attractions of Namibia tours here is to climb one of the biggest dunes at dawn and watch the sunrise from the crest. The saying goes that you have not truly lived until you have experienced that.

The stark desert landscape makes for beautiful photography and even though it is very dry here there are still some mammals around like the hardy springbuck and oryx, black backed jackals and brown hyena.

Rainfall is very sporadic here and difficult to predict so there isn't really a rainy season.

There is an estuarine lagoon at Sandwich harbour which is a wetland with a surprising diversity of birds like flamingos, pelican, grebe and plovers.

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3. Skeleton Coast National Park

If you like long, deserted coastlines with waves crashing over ancient, rusting shipwrecks then this park will be a bonanza for you. It is one of the most remote and inhospitable places on earth.

There is often a sea mist shrouding the dunes that stagger the coastline and sometimes whitewashed skeletons of long dead whales loom mysteriously through the fog having beached on the shore.

Nothing can live on this inhospitable coast but desert elephants have been seen in the interior and the Cape Frio seal colony contains several thousand cape fur seals. Whales and dolphin swim the coast on the way to their breeding grounds.

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4. Waterberg Plateau Park

Not a national park but worth a visit none the less, this unique reserve is set atop an orange rock plateau that once cover large portions of Namibia but has been weathered away over millions of years.

The animals are secretive here but on previous Namibia tours there have been sightings of leopard, black and white rhino, roan and sable antelope, wildebeest, giraffe and buffalo.

Over 210 species of bird have been recorded including Ruppels parrots and a variety of eagles, buzzards and falcons.

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