After a long and very boring drive of over 1000 Kms on a straight road, with nothing to see and only searing hot sun for company, we finally arrived in Etosha National Park.

This is one of the national parks always used on BBC animal documentaries when they are discussing animals living in extreme conditions.  Etosha, meaning 'place of dry water', is a huge 5000-sq-km calcrete pan. Put more simply, it looks like hundreds of miles dead dusty landscape, sometimes it is even so white, it looks like snow. 

We stayed our first night on the outskirts of the park so we could make an early start and enter the park at 7 am. On arriving at the farm campsite, the owners dog took a liking to us and spent the afternoon and evening following our every step. A fellow traveler who happened to a German vet asked if we brought our dog on holiday with us – no we replied, but we are part of ‘borrowmydoggy.com’

Etosha has three main camping grounds, and we booked one night in each, we had to book 10 months in advance to guarantee our stay in the park such is the demand.  

Etosha doesn’t only have to rely on rain for water – there are a few natural waterholes through out the park. We spent hours driving between these in the early morning, and then repeated the drive again in the evening. There are always special highlights to make the drives exciting, and when we were caught in the first rain storm for months, we wanted to sing and dance with the animals who had been waiting for the rains for months. Bizarrely, the first rainfall ruined our next day game drive as no animal had any need to go near the waterholes. 

To sum up Etosha, you can drive for hours thinking nothing survives in the desert, then you turn a corner and see a pride of lions, a leopard asleep on a signpost or sit watching two baby rhino's playing in a waterhole.  The park is extreme, amazing and strangely beautiful, but why anyone or anything would want to live there is beyond us.