Namibia

Namibia is the great self-drive country of Africa. Where most safari destinations lock you into fly-in camps and guided game drives, Namibia hands you a 4x4, a map, and 800,000 square kilometres of some of the most spectacular landscape on the continent. The roads are good, the infrastructure is solid, the population is sparse (just 2.5 million people in a country the size of France and Germany combined), and the scenery changes completely every few hundred kilometres.

The country's headline images are well known: the towering orange dunes of Sossusvlei, the cracked white floor of Deadvlei dotted with 900-year-old dead trees, the shipwreck-strewn fog of the Skeleton Coast, and the vast white pan of Etosha with its oddly desert-adapted elephants. Less famous but no less remarkable are Damaraland's desert-adapted elephants and rhinos, the ancient rock art of Twyfelfontein, and Fish River Canyon — the second-largest canyon in the world after the Grand Canyon, cut deep into the arid southern Namib.

Namibia also happens to be one of the world's conservation success stories. Community conservancies — locally managed wildlife areas that cover 20% of the country — have turned places like Damaraland from over-hunted near-wastelands into thriving wildlife refuges. The result is a country where the landscapes look empty but are full of life if you know how to look. For travellers who want genuine wilderness, genuine independence, and landscapes that look unlike anywhere else in Africa, Namibia delivers.