In our experience, a safari camp located along a permanent river in Namibia is unusual. We’ve enjoyed a stay on the rim of the Fish River Canyon, but the river was dry in most places. Our stay along the ephemeral Hoanib River provided endless wildlife viewing opportunities along its dry riverbed. We’ve stayed adjacent to the red dunes of Sossesvlei […]
When we began planning our return trip to Namibia with Expert Africa we knew we wanted to include the Skeleton Coast and the impressive dry riverbed of the Hoanib River in our itinerary. We got a brief glimpse of both on our first trip – just enough to make us want to return. The Hoanib Skeleton Coast Camp is located […]
I always like to see exactly where I’m going on a map before I get there. The vastness of Namibia (it’s twice as big as Spain) and its relatively small population (2.5 million in 2017) mean that almost every location outside of the capital city of Windhoek is remote. And sometimes difficult to find on a map. But remote and […]
Wine was not the primary reason we traveled to Namibia, but once we discovered there are several commercial wineries located in this arid African county we made it our mission to taste wine from as many of them as we could. It took two trips, but we have now tasted wine from all four commercial wineries in Namibia and visited […]
As it turns out, one visit to Namibia was not enough. Namibia has everything we enjoy when traveling in Africa: wide-open space, spectacular scenery and wild animal sightings. But it was a discovery we made as we were leaving Namibia on our first visit that made a return trip feel urgent: the Fish River Lodge. This is the brochure that […]
Ongava Game Reserve sits just south of Etosha National Park in northwest Namibia. The private reserve covers more than 74,000 acres that include rolling hills and mopane bush. As we drove from the airstrip to camp the landscape looked familiar, but not to anything we had seen in Namibia. Rather the rolling hills, dusty earth and rustling mopane bush reminded […]
As our small aircraft approached the airstrip near Damaraland Camp I was struck by the similarity of the landscape to the American desert Southwest. The wide, flat table-top mountains have those familiar, exposed, horizontal layers of colored rock. But, unlike the American southwest, the rusty red earth is dotted with green euphorbia, white ash bushes and the occasional, lone shepherd’s […]
The Namib Desert stretches for 1,200 miles along the coast of Africa beginning in southern Angola, continuing along the length of Namibia and into South Africa. Confined by the Atlantic Ocean to the west, and by the central plateau in Namibia to the east, it is not much more than 100 miles wide. The Namib Desert is the oldest in the […]
That first gin and tonic, sipped in the rooftop bar of the Hilton Windhoek Hotel tasted better than any in recent memory. It wasn’t because the gin was handcrafted in small batches, rather, it was because after 35 hours of travel we had reached our destination. Namibia. We were lured back to Africa by the expansive beauty of the Namib […]
We enjoy wine, food and travel. Pull That Cork is a chronicle of our wine adventures, the food and wine pairings we create and our travels which are increasingly organized around wine.