So what and where is Namibia? Well, Namibia is in south-west Africa and was originally called that! It was a German colony until the First World War after which time it was held under South African rule. It was the last African country to gain independance, which it did in 1990. The population of 1.9 million, dwelling in a country that is about twice the size of France, is divided into several ethnic groups.

I went to Namibia in November 2006 with my closest friend and fellow birdwatcher, Frank; and my two other great friends, Kathie and Pat. We four have shared many adventures together. The others had been to Africa before, but I had only been when I was a six-year-old child (to Kenya) and, though I have many memories of that trip, I wouldn't have appreciated it as much then as seeing it all through my adult's eyes some 20 years later! I never thought I'd get another chance to go to Africa, so it was that I went with a thirty-seven year old's eyes but the enthusiasm of that six-year-old.

Frank and I had done quite a bit of research prior to the trip, not least in selecting birding reference materials - we had decided to each take different guides to maximise our scope! Frank selected the Sasol guide and Sasol eGuide for his PDA. He had given me the Newman's guide so I just bought the Robert's eGuide for my PDA. Next came the unexpectedly, extremely complicated business of packing.

The baggage restrictions that came in as a result of 9/11 and subsequent scares - only one item of hand luggage - are quite a hassle for photographers. My excellent Lowepro wheeled photography bag that I have always taken on trips was no longer suitable for hand luggage. No way was I going to put my brand new Canon EOS 1D MkII N dSLR camera in the hold with all those valuable lenses, or my PSD (photo storage device), PDA, phone, etc! So what to do? Easy: buy one of those vest jackets that have all those pockets and bung in them things like PDA, PSD, phone, documents, money, drug stash (legitimate drugs like asthma stuff!) and then one smaller rucksack - the one item of hand luggage - for camera and lenses. Sorted! I envision a day when vest jackets become de rigeur - a strange rebellion in the face of restricted cabin baggage allowances. God forbid the day they bring out a special girly pink version!

The next problem was trying to get all the equipment I wouldn't be able to take on board (tripod and a crazy amount of cables, battery chargers and adapters) to fit in my holdall along with some clothes and toiletries! Needless to say, the latter had to take a bit of a back seat so I also took some washing powder so I could re-use my clothes and not have to pack so many therefore! All set for the off!

So, we four travellers met up with much excitement at London Gatwick and had a trouble-free ten-or-so hour flight to Windhoek, Namibia's capital. Upon disembarking, Frank and Kathie went through passport control to retrieve our luggage in their haste to get outside and have a smoke. Next in line, I approached the passport official who seemed to take an inordinate amount of time studying my documents before then, having thus incited my nerves, asking me where I was staying. Being that she organised the trip, Kath had the documents so I had no idea! Well, I have Asperger's Syndrome (high-functioning autism) and whilst I am supposed to be really bright, this sort of situation turns me into a gibbering idiot. I went into a blind panic, turned puce-red and sweating, and couldn't say a word! So there's a queue of impatient tourists waiting behind us whilst Pat, being a much-travelled and unflappable lady, came to our rescue trying to explain that we didn't know where we were staying but that the people that had just gone through did! This was obviously not an acceptable answer, so a good deal of verbal juggling ensued between officious and Pat whilst I increasingly resembled a cross between a porcupine and a goldfish! Realising something was amiss, Frank and Kath came back to rescue us and, without further ado, we went to collect our luggage.

Luggage retrieved, Pat and Kath went dashing out, nicotine-hungry, through customs. Frank wheeled our trolley through and then interrogation phase two occurred. Try explaining to a Namibian official that you are with two other people (who aren't with you just at that moment), and that some of the stuff on your trolley is theirs, not yours! I definitely reverted to being a six-year old at this point, eyebrows nearly touching the ceiling in dismay, but Frank handled it superbly with a sufficient level of appeasing body language that persuaded the officious lady let us through!

We Formula 1'd our trolley to the fag smoker's area and my panic subsided with every exhale of smoke and with every laugh from our friends as we regailed them with the latest "international incident" story (as we call such events - they do seem to happen to us a lot!). We went to find the tour guide, got everything loaded on our coach and then we were off into the unknown - Namibia here we come!

Namibia is divided into four geographic zones: the coastal Namib Desert (after which the country takes its name) that extends nearly 2.000 km along the Atlantic Ocean coast; a north-south mountain chain that rises to around 2,000 metres at the centre; the Kalahari desert in the east which borders Botswana; and wooded highlands in the North. Our tour took us to bits of the first two - you have to remember that Namibia is about twice the size of France, so you can only see the highlights in a week!

So, after a six-hour drive of several hundred kilometres we arrived, tired and hot, to our first destination - the Hammerstein Lodge, located about 65 km from Sossusvlei. We were greeted by drinks and the owner, who informed us not to be alarmed if the four-month old cheetah that wanders around the place says hello! He then went on to say that apart from the tame lynx, and a (tame?) zebra that bites, they have enclosures with leopards and other big cats! Wow! Suddenly I stopped feeling so travel-grumpy.

We were shown to our really lovely, chalet-style rooms. Of course, being "gadget dudes", Frank and my top priority was investigating the plug sockets to ensure our sizeable gadget charging requirements could be met! Becoming something of a "gadget dude" herself, Pat had made special plug adapter thingies for us to use. At some point amidst all this, Frank saw the cheetah and, stunned, began to wander over, increasingly trepidatiously as it began to wander towards him! A mad panic to locate my camera later, and I was out there for a shot.

My favourite species of big cat was actually lying down purring whilst Frank, with a kind of Cheshire cat grin on his face, was making a fuss of it! It was a really loud purr too, like a domestic cat through a microphone; it never occurred to me that big cats purr! So, in a kind of a stupor, I jabbed around for the shutter button in a rather random and frantic way to get some photos. As I knelt down by the beautiful creature, it looked up at me with huge liquid, magical eyes as if to say, "uhoh, another soppy human".

I spent ages interacting with it and, in between the increasingly noisy purring, it began to lick my hands and arms with its really rough tongue, obviously enjoying my salty sweat more than I had been! Its fur was so soft and sleek and, something I didn't expect when I investigated its huge paws, its claws were not at all sharp! Once we had established enough trust between us, I let it take my hand in its mouth the way such animals do in order to establish a mutual-trust-respect bond (I don't recommend you do this unless you are very savvy with animal behaviour!). Even with its huge teeth, it was so gentle with me. I found myself moved to tears at the experience - I wasn't sure if we'd even see cheetah in Namibia, let alone get to talk to one! Here's one of Frank's photos of me playing with said cheetah and Pat is there too in the second one:

After Cheetah had decided it had had enough of us soppy humans and had strolled off into the late afternoon sun, we wandered off in search of a pint of beer! I kept shaking my head saying, "I can't believe I've actually interacted with a cheetah"". This was definitely a major - if not the major - highlight of the trip for me, and that was only day one of the holiday!

Namibia, along with the rest of this sub-tropical part of the world, experiences two seasons: summer from October to April and winter from May to September. Between January and April, temperatures can reach 40 degrees C and are accompanied by high rainfall. In the winter season, temperatures vary around 23 degrees C. At night during any season, the temperature can drop to zero. Luckily we went to Namibia in November - their early spring - I don't like to imagine how hot where we went on day two - the Namib Desert - would have been in mid summer!

So, what of the Namib? It was formed about 80 million years ago - making it the world's oldest desert. It is noted for the Sossusvlei sea of sand dunes and the desert runs along the Atlantic coast - the "Skeleton Coast" - as sand dunes and further inland as rocky plains and plateux. This desert accommodates the World's fourth and Africa's biggest National Park - the Namib Naukluft, which extends to 50,000 square km.

So, day two doesn't dawn - we have to leave at some ungodly hour of the morning. Everything other than about 07:30 is the middle of the night for me, so the ensuing scramble and rummage around in my holdall to try and get my butt clothed and in gear and my photography kit sorted out when the alarm went off was challenging. Nevertheless, dishivelled and sweating from the panic of trying to get my act together, and with much chivvying from Frank, I made it to what we called our "tour bus" with a quick visual uptrack en route to tick something else off my "most-wanted" list: the Southern Cross - or the arse-end of it in this case! We loaded ourselves aboard the unbelievably sturdy (given the roads) coach that was to become our second home for the week; a fifty-seater occupied by only sixteen of us meant we could nicely spread out and occupy a two-seat section each with room to spare - and then we were off to Sossusvlei in the Namib desert!

The journey was as ungodly as the hour: long and, once we left what seemed to be Namibia's main road and hit a dual-carriageway dirt track, rather bumpy too: our bodies leapt off the seats like spooked springboks at one point! However, my early morning grumpy-old-woman-pissedoftness faded as we drove through the amazingly diverse Namibian scenery accompanied by the light gradually changing from that of a full moon gracing an otherwise dark sky, to the faint question of morning. We drove through moonkissed grassy plains, then menacing rocky mountains, then many hours later and around a bend in the road, sand dunes began to grow in the distance looking like the result of a giant, up-turned egg timer as the bus ate the kilometres up beneath its wheels.

First impressions of the desert? Vast tracts of sand (tip of the hat to Monty Python there). It was my first visit to "an actual desert" and I was almost knocked-over by the visual effect of the dramatically contrasting shades of oranges, reds and browns with greens and yellows, topped off with a cerulean blue icing as the sun came up and made the sky "day". The oranges, reds and browns are the desert and the blue is the sky, but the source of the yellows and greens probably aren't that obvious! Well, the yellow is the colour of the whispy, wafting, long grass that seems to occur everywhere, talking in the breeze at the edges of the desert, perhaps even in the desert - I don't know; we didn't go that far in. That grass was weird: in some lights it looked yellow, at others pale greenish, and even sometimes blue tinted, but it was the same grass nevertheless. The green is the colour of the strange bushes (small acacia-like shrubs) that seemed to be littered about, appearing like an afterthought of greenery in a child's painting.

Dune 45. Strange name for a dune I thought; perhaps the result of some kind of hitherto unknown by me taxonomic naming system specific to dunes? I expect the colloquial name is far more imaginatively stimulating for this dune, the largest in the world. We arrived there and I have to say I was a bit disappointed. Yes it is "biiiig" and beautifully coloured with a distinct apex giving a stark shadowy contrast on the lee side with the brighter sunkissed colour the other side. But that apex was covered with humans! Urrrgh! Hardly makes for good photography if you are just interested in the look of the thing! So we moved on.

Continuing on our journey in the tour bus, we ended up at "some place I am not sure where" in the desert, and there were hot air balloons taking off in the still early morning sunlight. These looked magnificent - all brightly striped in different colours making a lovely picture against the bright blue sky and the colours of the sands. I can't remember quite where we went to after that, but it was to see another bloody great dune. This time the tour bus parked up and we made our onward travel to the dune by jeep! This was great fun but I must have looked a sight juggling with my camera and long telephoto lens trying not to let it - or me - go overboard! Luckily, just as my bum started majorly complaining about the bumpy punishment, we arrived - at a huge, dried-up, white and highly-reflective pan surrounded by bushes and eucalyptus-style trees, the backdrop of which was the dune itself.

Whilst not as big as Dune 45, this dune was still fairly immense. Too immense for me to deign to climb, this having been suggested by our saddistic tour leader! I was too hot anyway, and would rather wander around the dried up pan and its various scrub and trees around the edges to do some wildlife photography. However, Frank was game and walked right up to the top and down the other side! I muttered to myself at various points during my own little tour, whilst keeping an eye on him in case he keeled over, "he must be mad". I really hoped he wasn't going to keel over up there with the heat because I didn't fancy having to undertake a rescue mission! Kathie and Pat went up a long way too, but being sensible souls, they came down! The photos Frank took from the top made me envious however; I was kind of annoyed that I couldn't boast to people back home that I'd climbed a sand dune in the Namib desert!

My own little expedition had gone wonderfully well. The pan at the foot of the dune was quite large with various bits of scrub and trees surrounding it. I couldn't believe the number of different birds I saw, including a close encounter with a Pale Chanting Goshawk who was sat atop one of the trees. I made a huge effort to stalk up to it, taking shots en route, trying to get closer and closer to it. You can imagine I felt rather silly when I got really close to it and it just seemed to look down on me in a rather inquisitive fashion as if it was pondering as to what this weird mammal was doing rustling about in the scrub. It wasn't bothered about my presence at all! Many other creatures were in that area for the photographing: lizards and funny little rodents and some truly bizare-looking insects.

Sometime between trips when we were at Hammerstein, Frank and I got a chance to go for a stroll and do some birdwatching - we couldn't believe the number of species we saw - so many in quick succession it was a job to keep up with the ticks! During that wander we passed the big cat enclosures and I got to interact with a leopard! This was rather funny because there are big fences (obviously!) but about two feet from the fence a single wire strand at hip-height. Not thinking about why that strand was there, I went the other side of it to get close to the main fence in order to talk to the leopard who was lying down right next to it. Upon seeing what I was doing, Frank insistently told me to get back - it hadn't occurred to me that said strand of wire was there to stop idiots like me getting too close to leopard and having a claw come through a hole in the main fence rip their face apart!

Anyway, the leopard was purring - and talking! Making all sorts of grumbling and loud and somehow plaintive meowing noises. It was lonely in there all on its own. I talked to it and it talked back to me. It was an amazing feeling, talking to a leopard. Later on, we got taken on a tour with all the other people to look at these big cats, but it wasn't nearly as special as just being on our own talking to that lonesome leopard.

The other funny story from Hammerstein concerned the zebra. I should say at this point that like most people with Asperger's Syndrome (or indeed, any form of autism) I have an unusual ability to interact with other animals and actually tend to find them easier than people - their body language is much easier to follow. Finding "other animals" easier than people meant that I have studied animal ethology in quite some detail since childhood. So, when we had been told that the zebra was grumpy and not to touch it I did take note but wondered why, knowing that it is unusual for a mammal to be aggressive without reason.

Anyway, we were sitting having lunch outside on the first day we arrived I think, and said zebra came up to the fence around 100 metres away and started talking to us, with that odd noise zebras make, in a way that told me it wanted some attention. So, leaving everyone else eating, I went over to it. It confirmed my belief that it wanted some attention by getting quite frantic in body language and voice as I approached. I didn't attempt to touch it at first, and just stood talking to it; empathising with it. It gradually calmed down and went completely docile and remained so when I decided to try and stroke it the way a fellow equine would - by scratching it on the withers (obviously other equines nibble a fellow herd member's withers with their teeth, but I wasn't going to do that!). It was quite happy then for me to rub its back, stroke its face and it didn't show one sign of aggression towards me.

During my communing with this beautiful animal, I heard people at the table begin to laugh and Frank came over with an amused look on his face that told me to look under the zebra's belly. It had its willy hanging right out! Of course, equines do this when they are being submissive or relaxed but I'd forgive people for not knowing this! So the joke was definitely on me "turning a zebra on" that afternoon! I felt so sorry for this creature, I didn't want to leave it there so lonely and sad. Herd animals like that are absolutely not meant to be on their own - it was simply lonely, and that was what was making it grumpy, like a human would be in solitary confinement :-(( So that made me very sad and I cried a bit. I wish people thought in terms of the animal's mind and desires, and not in terms of themselves.

Later, I had another interesting cheetah experience. I decided at some point to break off from having a beer and watching the birds at the feeders to go and have a swim in the nearby pool. I looked up and cheetah was coming right over to the edge of the pool! I swam over and it reached out its paw towards me a few times - I wondered if it was actually going to come in at one point! I cupped some water in my hands and it drank several handfulls - it was simply thirsty! It touched heads with me in that affectionate way cats can do, almost as if it was thanking me, and then went off to investigate my shoes! It started playing with them and Frank by this time had come over and, whilst trying to get photos, played with it by chucking the shoe into the air. I just couldn't believe any of this was happening - playing with a cheetah! It showed not one trace of becoming aggressive and just seemed pleased to have someone to play with. Frank got some more stunning photos. There's one with me in the pool below and one with Cheetah playing with one of my Birkenstocks - you can just imagine the ad, can't you: "Birkenstock, built to withstand the roughest play".

I was sad to leave Hammerstein. Apart from being a bit dismayed by the zebra being all alone, and worrying about the cheetah not having one of its own kind to interact with, I was most impressed by the place, its facilities and its staff who were all very friendly. The only difficulty was attempting to phone home to let my extremely tolerant husband, Pete, know I was okay - obviously mobiles do not work so far out "in the sticks". There was one payphone, but the queue to use it was quite spectacular. So if you intend to go to one of these lodges, be prepared that you won't easily be able to phone home. Anyway, I didn't think anything could top my first two days in Namibia - but there were a few things that came extremely close...

On day three, we made the long drive north in our tour bus to the Hotel Strand in the coastal town of Swakopmund. En route we stopped at various geologically interesting places, but the highlight for me was when we stopped off somewhere in the Namib to go and visit some members of the oldest plant species in the world, Welwitschia mirabilis, some of which are said to be about 2,000 years old! I wasn't surprised to find that the plant itself looks really incredibly boring from an aesthetic point of view! However, standing next to, and touching, one given its great age was quite an awesome experience.

Given its various regions, Namibia has a stunningly diverse collection of wildlife. It has 134 types of mammals, 620 birds, 70 reptiles, 20,000 insects with some of the World's rarest, 2,400 species of plants and 345 grasses! On the journey northwoods and to the desert before, we saw many different species. It was amazing seeing wild ostrich gracefully wafting over the plains - they really do seem to "waft", it is something to do with their downy, dangly feathers! So many different species of antelope: springbok, impala, wildebeest, hartebeest and my favourite, the Oryx or Gemsbok, which has beautiful pale shades of stone and beige coloured with bits of white and black on it - it just tones in so particularly well with the surroundings and is a particularly graceful antelope. Here is a picture of one below:

So if you are thinking of going, check out my favourite web sites below. It is certainly a place to which I would love to get the chance to return.