Things to Do in Damaraland

Tracking desert-adapted elephants in the Huab and Aba-Huab riverbeds

You ride out at first light. Open Land Cruiser. The Damara tracker reads dung, prints and broken branches like a newspaper. When you finally find them, a small breeding herd pulling pods from a camelthorn, they're calm, dust-bathed, almost copper-coloured, and they smell faintly of warm hay. The encounter feels quieter and more intimate than anything you'd get in Etosha, partly because there are usually no other vehicles within 30 kilometres.

Rock art at Twyfelfontein

A UNESCO World Heritage site about an hour's drive from the Aba-Huab area, Twyfelfontein has more than 2,500 engravings hammered into the sandstone: giraffes, lions with curiously human footprints, a famous dancing kudu. A local Damara guide walks you through. One-hour loop. By 10am the heat reflecting off the red rock tells you immediately why you should have come earlier. Touch nothing. The engravings are softer than they look.

Climbing to the White Lady panel on the Brandberg

Namibia's highest mountain rises out of the gravel plains like a stranded continent. The walk to the famous White Lady rock painting takes about 90 minutes return along the Tsisab Ravine. You'll hear the rustle of klipspringer in the scree and the dry tick of cicadas overhead. The painting itself was long mis-identified as a European woman; it's almost certainly a male shaman. It sits in a cool overhang that smells of bat and old smoke. The Brandberg massif is gigantic. This is the gentle introduction.

Petrified Forest and Burnt Mountain loop

Two geological oddities about 40 minutes apart make a satisfying half-day. The Petrified Forest is a scatter of 280-million-year-old fossilised tree trunks lying across the gravel as if dropped that morning, with welwitschia plants (those bizarre two-leaved survivors) growing between them. Burnt Mountain and the nearby Organ Pipes are a basalt extrusion that does glow purple-black at sunset. The dolerite columns ring faintly underfoot.

Rhino tracking on foot with Save the Rhino Trust

The Palmwag concession holds the largest free-ranging population of black rhino left on earth. The only way to see them is on foot. You go with a trust tracker. You'll spend three or four hours walking through euphorbia hills, voices kept low, the tracker reading wind direction off scattered ash. Then you crest a ridge and see one browsing 80 metres below. It's heart-thumping. Numbers are kept small and the funds go directly to anti-poaching patrols.

Twyfelfontein / Aba-Huab area. The most central base, closest to rock art and the Petrified Forest. Lodges range from community campsites to luxury tented camps.

Palmwag. Way into the rhino concession and desert-adapted wildlife in the north-east. More remote and quieter than Twyfelfontein.

Brandberg / Uis. Small mining-town-turned-traveller-stop at the foot of Namibia's highest mountain. Useful as a southern entry point.

Khorixas. The only proper town in central Damaraland. Fine for a fuel-and-fridge stop rather than an overnight unless you're on a tight budget.

Hoanib River area, far north. Fly-in only in practical terms. The desert-adapted lion research concentrates here, and the camps are correspondingly pricey.

Doro Nawas. Small concession east of Twyfelfontein with one of the more architecturally striking lodges in Namibia and reliable elephant sightings.