The Namib Desert is said to be the oldest desert in the world.
It shapes the patterns of the driest country in Sub-Saharan Africa. Namibia is a sparsely-populated country of vast and beautiful desert landscapes.
But it is by no means a barren or desolate country. It is home to a great diversity of plant and animal species, many of them endemic to its ecosystems.
The country's rugged and varied topography includes the forbidding Skeleton Coast, the vast Etosha salt pan, the swamps and rivers of the Zambesi Region in the Caprivi as well as one of the deepest canyons and the highest sand dunes in the world.
Over fourteen ethnic groups make up the colourful human population: traditional herdsmen living the nomadic life of the desert pastoralist; agriculturalists, fishermen and cattle barons;
Bushmen with legends of the great hunter-gatherers still alive in their memory; businessmen, farmers and entrepreneurs of European origin.
Namibia is diverse as few other countries: swamps and deserts, elephants and golden moles, welwitschias and baobabs, vast spaces and friendly people.
The Kalahari Basin holds the greatest accumulation of sand in the world, stretching from the Orange River to the rainforests of the Congo.
The arid areas of the Kalahari covers around 80 percent of Botswana. Vast stretches of deep sand that soak up every drop of erratic summer rainfall, leaving no surface water, but storing moisture underground that supports woodland and savannah, and herds of wildlife.
Even the mighty Okavango River is absorbed as it meanders out into the Kalahari.
But where it is slowed by the sand, it creates a great inland delta, an unsurpassed wilderness of clear channels, swamps and thickets teeming with wildlife.
Even the mighty Okavango River is absorbed as it meanders out into the Kalahari.
But where it is slowed by the sand, it creates a great inland delta, an unsurpassed wilderness of clear channels, swamps and thickets teeming with wildlife.
In 1967, a year after Botswana' s independence, diamonds were discovered in its hinterlands, providing the sparsely populated country with a strong economy in addition to its stable political structure.
A far-sighted conservation policy protects 18% of the country in national parks and reserves.
And so Botswana remains a vast, largely roadless wilderness of deep Kalahari sands, great salt pans and savannahs. And somewhere in that vastness lies its greatest jewel, the Okavango Delta.
The mighty Zambesi River between the countries Zimbabwe and Zambia tumbles down at a 1 700 metres wide and over a 112 metres high gorge with a huge cloud of spray and some colourful rainbows and keeps on flowing further with a loud roar. The local languages call this magic place "the smoke that thunders". David Livingstone called them in honour of his queen Victoria Falls.
South Africa has by far the most developed and modern infrastructure on the sub-continent.
But it is steeped in long and turbulent history.
The road to becoming one free nation was much longer and seldom less turbulent than the political turmoil of the last half century.
The southern shores of the African continent formed a natural boundary to the overpowering Bantu migration out of West Africa.
They also formed the stepping stone for European settlement and colonisation of the entire subcontinent, the foothold for early explorers, hunters and traders seeking to penetrate the interior; the stage for great power struggles, wars, treaties and barters between and among African and European Empires.
Place-names and the names of events and individuals ring with history: The Cape of Good Hope, the Voortrekkers, Shaka Zulu, Blood River, the Anglo-Boer wars, apartheid, Soweto, Nelson Mandela.
Silent backdrop to all was and is the vast African landscape.
And in modern South Africa, vibrant, diverse and effervescent, one can still find large stretches of wilderness beyond picturesque, cultivated countrysides and the monuments of history.
