• In Windhoek, the attractive capital, admire the German colonial architecture of the Alte Feste (website: www.natmus.cul.na), which houses a museum of Namibian history, the Tintenpalast parliament building and the Christuskirche, the city's landmark church.

• The Namib Desert, believed to be the oldest desert in the world, is extremely impressive. Visit Namib Naukluft Park, the fourth-largest conservation area in the world, where oryx stroll over apricot-, ochre- and fawn-coloured dunes tufted with grasses.

• Be amazed by the Fish River Canyon, the world's largest after the Grand Canyon, and the nearby Kokerboom Forest, home of bizarrely elegant kokerbooms (quiver trees). These giant aloes were often used by the San people to make quivers for their arrows and are now a protected plant in Namibia.

• On a nature trail across the gravel plains of the arid and forbidding Skeleton Coast region, see ancient desert-adapted plant species such as welwitschia, lithops and delicate lichens.

• See cheetahs, leopards, lions and endangered wild dogs in at the AfriCat Foundation, Okonjima, a predator rehabilitation centre and luxury lodge (website: www.africat.org). In the larger enclosures, the cats are radio-collared so guides should be able to guarantee close-up sightings.

• Visit the huge, malodorous Cape fur seal colony at Cape Cross; around November plenty of young pups can be seen huddled next to their mothers on this isolated stretch of rocky shore.

• In Damaraland, the Brandberg/Twyfelfontein area has some very ancient rock engravings and paintings, of which the White Lady of the Brandberg is the best known. Nearby, admire the unusual phenomenon of the Aba-Huab Petrified Forest, a collection of around 50 fossilised trees thought to be over 250 million years old.

• Watch rare desert-adapted elephants as they browse the trees in the dry beds of the Ugab and Huab Rivers in northern Namibia, or dig down into the earth with their tusks in search of water.

• Visit the kraal, or homestead, of indigenous semi-nomadic pastoralists, the Himba, in the Kaokoland region of northern Namibia, to learn about tribal customs and desert survival techniques.

• In West Caprivi, stop at the Popa Falls Rest Camp, a popular haven on the banks of the Okavango River, where crocodiles and hippos bask in the water. About 12km (7 miles) to the south is Mahango Game Reserve, with elephants, buffalo and lechwe.

See Contact Addresses for further tourist information.