Etosha National Park in Namibia is one of the largest game parks in Africa, at some 22,270 sq kilometres in area surrounding a central salt pan. The local Ovambo people named Etosha – as ‘huge white area’ or ‘place of dry water’. In the dry season the Pan is an inhospitable place where salt crystals reflect the sun to form mirages.
All our group tours visit Etosha National Park. It’s one of the best parks in Africa to visit on a self drive safari.
The governmental lodges and campsites are within the park and offer great waterholes where you can sit and enjoy hours in the evening. The privately owned lodges close to the entrances are much better in service and worth the short drive towards the entrance.
Etosha South
Located just south of the boundary of Etosha National Park in northwestern Namibia, Etosha South makes up the southern region of this wild paradise. Ogava Private Game Reserve shares the southern boundary with Etosha National Park and offers an array of luxury lodges overlooking picturesque landscapes dotted with abundant wildlife. The national park can be accessed via the southern entrance at Andersson’s Gate. Visitors can catch a glimpse of a variety of wildlife including: lion, giraffe, elephant, white and black rhino, and a multitude of plains game. Popular activities include: game drives, tracking rhinos on foot, guided nature walks, or watch the sunset over this magnificent landscape.
Etosha East
In the vast arid space of Northern Namibia lies one of Southern Africa’s best loved wildlife sanctuaries. The Etosha National Park offers excellent game viewing in one of Africa’s most accessible venues. Zebra and springbok are scattered across the endless horizon, while the many waterholes attract endangered black rhinoceros, lion, elephant and large numbers of antelope. Etosha, meaning ‘place of dry water’, is encloses a huge, flat calcrete depression (or pan) of about 5 000km². The ‘Pan’ provides a great, parched, silver-white backdrop of shimmering mirages to an area of semi-arid savannah grassland and thorn scrub. The pan itself contains water only after very good rains and sometimes for only a few days each year, but is enough to stimulate the growth of a blue-green algae which lures thousands of flamingos.
Etosha Pan
Aeons ago, Etosha Pan was the bed of a vast lake; today what remains is a glittering, silvery-green salt pan that stretches across roughly 5000 square kilometres. Etosha is protected by the Etosha Pan National Park surrounded by savannah plains and woodlands supporting large herds of elephants. When dry, the pan sustains little life except for the algae that gives it its distinctive colour, and migratory birds that use it as a pit stop, but with heavy rain it becomes a shallow lake where flamingos breed, pelicans wade and feed, and a variety of mammal species come to quench their thirst, including leopards, lions, white rhinos, hunting dogs and antelopes.
