Travel reviews by Mr J & son from UK

"This was our first ever Safari camp/trip anywhere and it set the bar for the others very high.

Our prime focus was wildlife and it delivered in Spades - great sightings of Cheetahs & Leopards as promised and loads of other great sightings including a colony of baboons, a brown hyena, kori bustards, dik diks, elands, genets, giraffes, honey badgers, jackals, porcupines, red hartebeest and wild dogs.

The AfriCat foundation was very interesting.

We had great game drives, including a night drive just for my son & I when we saw the honey badgers and porcupines and much more.

The food was excellent.

To explain the two only ‘good’ ratings below:

Rooms - more than adequate for us but couldn’t rate as excellent because the en suite in the garden room was small, a bit dark and a bit bare.

Service - two slight hiccups: I wanted a shower one afternoon but no hot water and it wasn’t fixed quickly so I had to wait till the next morning (was tied up with the night drive in the evening); upon paying by card for the activities as we were leaving I was told the first attempt had failed but in fact ended up being double charged. To their credit, by the time we arrived at our next camp there was a message for us telling me that and sending me a form to claim a refund.

My son & I can highly recommend OPC - the icing on the cake was a leopard wandering in front of our car on the exit drive!"

"This is a luxury safari camp in a remote, Monument Valley style semi-desert setting. The tone was set from the outset when the staff met us upon arrival to sing us a welcome and give us an arrival drink.

The main point is that it does what it says on the tin - you get to see desert rhinos! What an experience - 0500 wake up for 0530 breakfast and 0600 start. For us a 2 hour drive west to the fog belt through a remote, harsh, spectacular landscape to the sightings area. Then a search (no radio tracking here) and eventual 600m walk up to the first sighting - a fully horned mother and calf about 200m away in a natural amphitheatre setting. Later 2 sightings at much closer quarters of de-horned males. Fantastic! Then a 90 minute drive to a great picnic spot beneath a cliff in the shade. Finally another hour’s drive back to base.

Two warnings:

- you don’t see nearly as much wildlife here as, for example, in Etosha or Okinjima but when you do the setting is much more amazing, e.g. a single large giraffe in a huge vegetation-less plain of brown boulders - what was it doing there?; and
- the 7+ hour safari was very bumpy, eventually very hot and exhausting for a 66 year old like me. Perhaps not a good choice for infirm or unfit pensioners. But what an experience.

The food was excellent, we loved the communal dining (outdoors on our first night) and drinks (excepting premium wines) were free and plentiful.

Great drive out and canyon picnic with Jeff, one of the friendly and informative guides.

Can only rate service as good because we got to the pick up point 1 minute before the deadline (didn’t realise only gravel roads for the last 125k!) to find the pick-up had left. It had to turn round to collect us, which delayed and rushed our arrival (as we wanted to go straight out on the 1630 afternoon game drive)."

"Etendeka is a very special place - it is set in a remote, semi-desert, mountainous area. Dennis, the host and Bonnie, the main guide were the most knowledgeable (about wildlife and Namibian conservation) people we met on our trip.

Unlike other safari camps, where early morning and late afternoon drives seem to be the norm, here there is a 3-4 hour morning walk. You see less ‘big’ game but a lot more of the smaller, more intimate stuff - birds, vegetation, tracks etc. and there is much more time for explanations and discussion. Our 2nd morning walk with Bonnie was one of the highlights of our whole trip - the high plateau, ‘crystal’ walk with views you can only dream of. Here we saw the elusive klipspringer.

We saw less here on afternoon drives than elsewhere and none of the ‘big 5’ (although a lion was outside a fellow traveller’s tent during the night and there was evidence of rhino droppings) but we did see something Dennis said he had only seen 3 times in 25 years - a desert adapted tortoise.

The food was the best of anywhere, again we loved the communal dining and Dennis was a great host with his explanations, stories and night sky telescope (I’d never seen Saturn’s rings or the detail of the moon before).

To explain the two only ‘good’ ratings below:

Rooms: we loved the simple tents and bucket shower but it would be misleading to give them an excellent rating.
Facilities: this is a simpler, less luxurious camp than some others (but we liked it for that). If I had to force myself to gripe it would be that the small pool was covered over. I had a fleeting fancy to sit with my feet in it one hot early afternoon. I’m sure Dennis or Bonnie would have uncovered it if I had asked but they weren’t around and I was too lazy to pursue it."

"If you are visiting Namibia to see wildlife, a visit to Etosha is a must. Okaukuejo is the central camp, with the main waterhole where each night and most mornings we saw groups of black rhinos, elephants and giraffes - as well as various antelope species, birds and (once) a slender mongoose.

The location and rooms we had (a premier waterhole chalet and nearby disabled chalet) are excellent. However, the overall feel is of an infrastructure that was set up 20 years or so ago and hasn’t received the investment necessary to maintain it as topnotch. Given the wealth of the overseas visitors, I would recommend immediately doubling or tripling the park fees for non-Namibians and investing the extra income in better catering, better maps (the ones provided in the park are incomplete and misleading, e.g. at least one permanent waterholes missed off, several shown as permanent are dry, not all the [gravel] roads are shown) and re-painted signposts (many have become faint and some completely obliterated over time). Also there is little updated info about what game has been seen recently at what waterhole.

The catering is of average to poor canteen standard (greasy breakfasts, boring bread, very similar and rather dull evening meals) - unlike the good restaurant standard food we found at other camps. If food is important to you, then find a private camp outside the park and travel in daily. Service was also not (as elsewhere) uniformly excellent here - perhaps inevitable with more staff dealing with much higher volumes of tourists - but it was mostly good.

Our highlights were good ‘spots’ we made ourselves eg) a couple of lions hunting in the late afternoon, a spotted hyena sleeping by a roadside bush in the early morning and a few waterhole experiences - the main waterhole (see above), a big elephant herd at Goas and the biggest concentration we saw one morning at Ozonjuitji m’Bari (a longish drive W of camp but worth it), at least several hundred animals and birds of various species."

"This is a high class B&B at a location in Windhoek convenient for the city centre and the road to the airport.

The service, rooms and food were excellent. We arrived early afternoon following a long drive from Etosha and luxuriated in resting on the beds whilst watching the Euros (international ‘soccer’ for our transatlantic friends) on TV."