LONELY PLANET'S OFFICIAL ITINERARY INFORMATION
Itinerary: Caprivi to Kaokoveld
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TWO WEEKS / KASANE TO SKELETON COAST WILDERNESS
This is not an itinerary for the faint-hearted. You’ll need either a plane or a boat to get to Mpalila Island, where you'll have to be booked into one of the lodges. Other than that you’ll need a 4WD, and you can just about forget public transport.
Many places in Namibia give you a vague sense that you’ve reached the end of the earth, but some of the destinations in this itinerary really are other-worldly. Getting to them, too, presents a major challenge that definitely isn’t for the faint-hearted.
To do this trip as a continuous journey, you’re best off starting from Kasane in Botswana. From here you can charter a plane or boat to Mpalila Island, a luxuriously remote retreat stranded in the middle of the Zambezi. From here, head into Namibia’s Caprivi Strip and visit the mini-Okavango of the Mamili National Park before plunging into the untamed wilderness that is Khaudom Game Reserve.
From Khaudom the road will take you south through Grootfontein, from where it’s worth making a short detour to the Waterberg Plateau Park. The park is famous as a haven of endangered species like sables, roans and white rhinos, some of which you may be lucky to spot along one of the well-marked hiking trails.
North of Grootfontein the road takes you into Namibia’s cultural heartland, the Ovambo region, from where you can access the remote and mysterious Kaokoveld, homeland to the Himba and one of the most inaccessible areas of the country. It would be great if you could just detour from here to the Skeleton Coast Wilderness, the most wild and woolly northern reaches of the coastal desert, with its roaring barchan dunes. Alas, this is a private concession so access is restricted to guests of the terrifically remote Skeleton Coast Wilderness Camp. If you have a few spare pennies this is certainly one of those once-in-a-lifetime experiences.
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