The country seemed empty after Zambia but the infrastructure was complete and well maintained. Even in Windhoek, the capital, you drive on the city’s ring road motorway at rush hour and there are ten other vehicles on the whole road. It’s as if they built the country for 30 million people and then two thirds went to live somewhere else. This isn’t the case (in fact everyone comes here from Angola and now, Zimbabwe), they just like to keep everyone employed and each road, no matter how tiny, has its own man with a huge JCB grading-machine who is employed solely to drive up and down all day each day, making the road perfect all the time (but being an old German colony with still many Germans living there, maybe its no surprise). So, with almost full employment it’s a shame that you get so much begging in hotels, restaurants and campsites. Maybe they don’t get too much money.

After driving in from Zambia to the east, we drove over to the northwest, towards the Atlantic Ocean and the famed Skeleton Coast. The northwest is very dusty and full of strange people. The main tribe is the Himba, a resolute bunch who weren’t ever bothered that much by the Germans or the Portuguese and haven’t changed their culture at all. Like something out of Star Wars Bartertown, the Himba cover their clothes, their skin and their hair with the red mud you find everywhere in their area. Both sexes go bare-chested whilst the young men sport tufty, Mohawk haircuts and the women fashion their hair into a crown of horns and long, mud-smooth dreadlocks in great rings down their backs.

Soon we hit the Skeleton Coast National Park and the start of the Namib Desert. We could see for miles across the empty landscape and got very excited as the giant waves of the Atlantic came into view over the horizon. I’m not surprised that the Portuguese sailors who got shipwrecked in this moonscape five hundred years ago gave up all hope of survival. But we had Connie and so drove at a hundred kilometres an hour down the gravel roads with the Atlantic whipping at our flanks.

After this we spent a lot of time in Windhoek, sorting out our difficult Angolan visas (which we eventually got!) and doing more jobs on the car. We spent most of our time in the shopping malls (not fun) and Schneider’s restaurant (great fun) - a restaurant in the middle of the city, selling good German food (no, really) and draught Hansa beer.

While we waited for things to happen, we took trips into the countryside from the city. One place we visited was Sossusvlei, a perfectly formed giant sand dune at the edge of the Namibe desert. It is the most popular tourist attraction in the country and priced accordingly (they put up their camping prices on the 1st November this year from $20 a pitch to about $80). We had great fun letting some of the air in our tyres out and driving through the deep sand (we got stuck for the first time and needed a fair bit of digging to get ourselves out). Afterwards we stayed at the old German staging post at Solitaire where our campsite was home to a pair of habituated Meerkats. And whilst these creatures don’t beg from you or steal your food they do just hang about bothering you, occasionally digging a hole for no apparent reason.

Between Solitaire and Windhoek we stayed in fancy campsites on private Game Farms - huge estates with fences stretching for miles. As in most African countries, Namibia has a quota system whereby a certain amount of game can be hunted and killed each year. It’s a bit like culling only with bloodthirsty westerners flying in, paying top dollar and spending a week shooting animals allowed to breed especially for the purpose.

After getting our precious Angolan visas, we drove north for our final Namibian treat: Etosha National Park. Famed as a lion hotspot and consisting of a giant salt plain circled with watering holes, we were hopeful there would be lots of stuff to gawp at. We weren’t disappointed. One of the campsites has a floodlit watering hole within camp and a viewing area perched above it. We sat until midnight watching the nocturnal animals and elephants come to drink. We also saw four hungry lionesses prowling around at dusk, coming for a pre-hunt drink. They returned later, much sleepier and with a satisfied air about them.

The following day we heard about lions from a safari guide as we drove in the late afternoon. We rushed to the watering hole and, pushed for time, Jackie flew into the turning circle too quick and I shouted stop. She put on the brakes and there, two metres from the car, was a cavorting lion and lioness. He turned to check us out; the look those animals give you is like no other, it feels like he could open your car like a tin-opener and dig you out like Whiskas. Fortunately he turned his attentions back to the lioness and they proceeded to mate; biting necks and roaring and all that. Thirty seconds later she was lying on her back, purring with her feet in the air. Easily pleased, these lionesses.

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