Damaraland

Damaraland takes its name from the Damara people, and for a few years before independence it was a homeland governed from Khorixas. Its best-known valley is Twyfelfontein, the “uncertain spring”, where water seeps from beneath a sandstone table mountain above the Aba Huab. Around it lie more than two thousand engravings of rhinoceros, elephant, ostrich and giraffe, the oldest several thousand years old, and in 2007 the site became Namibia’s first entry on the World Heritage List.

This is open, stony country that carries more life than it seems to: safaris here go out tracking desert elephant and black rhino. What little rain there is falls in summer, mostly from January to March; the southern winter brings clear days in the low twenties and cold nights.

• The Lion Man A carved lion whose long, kinked tail ends in a six-toed print, read as a person turning into an animal.
• Organ Pipes and Burnt Mountain Columns of dark rock in a gully and a scorched-looking hill, both a short drive from the engravings.
• Petrified Forest Fossil tree trunks lying in the open, part of the same circuit around Twyfelfontein.