28 Days, 26 lodges, 7,851 kilometres, 2,100 photographs, 22 bowls of butternut soup and a whole heap of dust. On commission for Fodor’s Travel I visited Namibia and while I will still write thousands of words on this magnificent place, I choose to start with these.

 Namibia!

Dramatic. Emotive. Soul-inspiring. Landscape, landscape, landscape.

Namibia dawns on us like the unveiling of a grand piece of art being shown for the first time. A gift that I have waited for years to open. It has been lying there taunting me for years until finally I begin to unwrap it, one delightful landscape at a time.

Smiling faces, warm soft accents greet us at every turn. Great clouds of dust billow out from behind us for almost 6000km of the trip and I sit watching it in the side mirror, mesmerised by its persistence as it swallows up the vistas.  The sun beats relentlessly through my window, but I’m numb to its driving fingers – I’m in love, in love with every patch of sand as it unfolds in front of me. From the white blinding plains of Etosha, through the dark menacing rocks of Damaraland, to the moving dunes of the West Coast right through to the soul-exciting shiny red sand of the Namib Naukluft.

I have fallen in love with the blond fields that line corners of these sands as they ripple with the wind. Waves of light run across the endless plains stopping only to alight on a statuesque oryx as he poses for the camera. My soul is smiling, in fact it is running, arms out spread shouting beneath the Big Sky of Namibia.

Thank you Namibia for giving me more words with which to fuel my passion and many beautiful pictures to remember you by.

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