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Accommodation in Namibia
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Namibia is the self-drive country. The roads are long, empty and mostly gravel, the distances are honest, and the landscape changes completely every day: the red dunes of the Namib one morning, the white pan of Etosha a few days later, fog and shipwrecks on the Skeleton Coast in between. Two weeks and a car with decent clearance cover the classic loop out of Windhoek; three weeks reach the far north or the Fish River Canyon in the south.
May to October is the season. Days are clear and bearable, nights are cold, and in Etosha the dry months pull game to the waterholes in numbers, with the floodlit holes at the rest camps running through the night. Sossusvlei is best in the first hour after the Sesriem gate opens, which is an argument for sleeping inside it. Summer is very hot inland and turns the Etosha pan into a shallow lake with flamingos on it.
Much of the country is malaria-free, which is unusual for this kind of trip, and the desert skies are among the darkest anywhere. Stays run from the Namibia Wildlife Resorts camps inside the national parks to small private camps on the reserves, and the guesthouses of Swakopmund and the farm towns between them.