Namibia

Home to some of the world’s most ethereal landscapes and some of Africa’s greatest wilderness, Namibia offers a singular experience. Its wide open spaces, star-washed night skies, and raw desert coast seem to come straight out of some surreal dream: the sort of dream that, in memory, never fails to tug at the heart.

There’s no question that Namibia supplies some of the greatest wildlife and scenery anywhere in Africa. Etosha National Park in the northwest is internationally lauded: From the heat-shimmering salt pans to the zebra, kudu, springbok, elephants, blue wildebeest, black rhinos, lions, hyenas, and other beasts congregating at waterholes, this is one of the planet’s great ecological reserves. Over on the Atlantic margin, the fog belt of the dune-skeined Namib Desert includes the Skeleton Coast, famed for its fur-seal colonies, its numerous shipwrecks, and the occasional beach-prowling lion.

Outdoor adventurers, meanwhile, find one of the continent’s most exciting hiking venues in the gigantic Fish River Canyon, which shatters the great escarpment that separates the coastal Namib Desert from Namibia’s interior plateau. Whether you’re into independent excursions or guided treks, this 1,800-foot-deep gorge, which serves as a worthy counterpart to the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, delivers unbelievable vista after unbelievable vista.

Like few other corners of Africa, Namibia accommodates road-tripping and adventure sports. The Namib Desert, for instance, is a growing destination for adrenaline junkies: Besides surfers hugging the cold breakers of the Skeleton Coast, the soaring inland dunes are increasingly renowned for “sandboarding,” the arid-desert version of snowboarding. And no trip here would be complete without a skydive over Swakopmund.

Namibia’s one of the most sparsely populated countries on Earth, but those who take the time to investigate its ethnic and cultural diversity will come away rewarded. The country’s share of the Kalahari forms part of the heartland of the San or Khoisan people, traditional hunter-gatherers known for their rich mythology. Namibia’s legacy of German colonialism, meantime, finds jovial expression in the capital Windhoek’s famed Oktoberfest celebration, which has been going strong for better than half a century.

Desolate sand-whipped roads, bizarre inselbergs, single-file herds of oryx and elephant, the cosmopolitan but modestly scaled bustle of Windhoek—Namibia casts a remarkable sun-blasted spell on any traveler open to its frontier character.