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Route
Windhoek → Sesriem → Sossusvlei → Solitaire → Kuiseb canyon → Walvis Bay → Swakopmund → Cape Cross → Spitzkoppe → Twyfelfontein → Palmwag → Grootberg → Etosha → Windhoek
Distance
2330 km
Duration
9 days, ~40 hours on the road
8 nights, most of them under the clearest sky in the southern hemisphere Best Months May to October Dry season — cool desert nights, and the game concentrated at Etosha's waterholes The Big Sights Deadvlei's camel thorns, dead 700 years The Kuiseb canyon moonscape 100,000 seals at Cape Cross The Twyfelfontein engravings Okaukuejo waterhole at midnight Parks & Protected Areas Namib-Naukluft National Park Dorob and the Skeleton Coast fringe Etosha National Park Signature Roads The C14 through the Kuiseb The salt road, Swakopmund → Cape Cross Grootberg pass into the Klip valley |
Route Map
Open in Google Maps The Plan Namibia is the best self-drive country on earth, and the reasons are structural: three people per square kilometre, gravel graded well enough to cruise at 80, fuel at every crossroads, and no guide, convoy or permit beyond the park gates. The loop runs anticlockwise. Sossusvlei's dunes at dawn and Deadvlei's seven-hundred-year-old dead trees; Swakopmund, a German seaside town that never noticed the empire ended; the hundred thousand seals at Cape Cross; Damaraland's granite domes, ancient engravings and desert elephants; and Etosha to finish, where the Okaukuejo waterhole is floodlit all night and the parade comes to the bench. Nothing is technically hard. The distances are the challenge, and also the point: hours of gravel running dead straight at a horizon that never arrives.
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