Price: $9995 (see Strabo Tour’s site for details)
Leaders: Jed Manwaring and Brenda Tharp
Namibia is a desert paradise for photographers. Like many deserts of the world, this one holds secrets of unique animals and plants, and a wonderful geological story that unfolds as we travel from destination to destination. On this Namibia Photo Tour, we’ll explore and photograph diverse locations and photograph the wildlife, landscape and people of the areas we visit. We’ll be joined by co-leader pro photographer Brenda Tharp. Together, we can offer you years of expertise in photographing a variety of subjects, and creative ideas to making the best pictures you can on the journey.
Visit Brenda's archive of Namibia photographs to see images from previous tours.
Here are key highlights – and other highlights will be what we experience along the way!
• Quiver Forest, we experience a landscape of giant aloe plants that are amazing and wonderful subjects to photograph as the rock hyrax scamper about the rock piles in this land.
• Aus, we aim for a hopeful visit to the wild horses (hopeful because they are, after all, wild and unpredictable!) and to position ourselves for a full day’s exploration of the abandoned mining town of Kolmanskop with it’s dilapidated buildings filling with sand as nature persists to take back the land.
• Namib-Naukluft National Park, a journey through red rock formation and to reach Sossusvlei with the tallest dunes in the world. We’ll spend our days here getting out for first light to photograph the dunes and the ancient camelthorn acacia trees in Deadvlei. Wildlife can also be seen – single ostriches, gemsbok (Oryx), jackals and springbok are often seen wandering this harsh landscape, and tracks of other animals have been found, too. An opportunity for flightseeing or hot air ballooning is available, too.
• Upland desert area of Damaraland, to view ancient petroglyphs at Twyfelfontein and have our first game drives in search of desert-adapted elephants, along with game drives in Palmwag Conservancy, a great location for rhino, lions, mountain zebra and more.
• Visit to the Himba tribespeople north of here brings a cultural connection to a beautiful people that decorate their bodies with ochre from the earth. We visit as a group to a remote village and meet and spend time with them, accompanied by our Himba (though english-speaking) guide.
• Etosha National Park – we enter from the west, beginning the first of several daily drives to photograph wildlife. Our last key destination, we’ll spend our days exploring the parks many waterholes and land in between to seek out and photograph the wildlife. Elephants, springbok, oryx, wildebeest, kudu, hartebeest, lions, black-backed jackals, rhinos, cheetah, zebra, dik-dik, and other smaller animals will be our potential subjects.
Each day we are out early for pre-dawn/sunrise light, whether it’s landscapes or animals we’re seeking. We take midday breaks, and head out to explore in the afternoon light again. Some days we’ll be exploring and photographing all day, but general the emphasis is on mornings and late afternoons for the light and the wildlife activity.
Join us for this most unforgettable journey to Namibia. For more details and to register, please go to Strabo Photo’s Namibia Photo Tour Page.