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...
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.
View Etosha safari trip reports »
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.
View Namib safari trip reports »
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.
View Skeleton Coast trip reports »
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.
View Waterberg Plateau trip reports »
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