Where to stay

Hotel Heinitzburg Heinitzburg Street, Luxury Hill, Windhoek, 00 264 61 249 597, heinitzburg.com. Family-owned Relais & Châteaux property overlooking Windhoek, with easy access to the airport 40km away. All that you’d expect from a European-inspired hotel, pool, terrace, fine dining. Rooms designed by the owner Beate Raith. Doubles from £200.

Olive Grove 20 Promenaden Road, Windhoek, 00 264 239 199, olivegrove-namibia.com. Officially a guest house, it’s more of a boutique hotel. Rooms from £55, but the garden suite at £200 has its own patio, sun loungers, plunge pool and trimmings that would cost three times as much in Europe.

SilverSand silversandhunting.com Less than an hour from the airport off the Trans-Kalahari Highway, this is a very personal, private hunting lodge that only takes 15 hunters each year. Marco Seefeldt, the farmer is a qualified PH (Professional Hunter) and partner Gina, a very talented cook. Prices relate to hunting; an eight-day package is just under £4,000.

Wolwedans NamibRand, 00 264 61 230616, wolwedans-namibia.com An hour’s flight from Windhoek by private plane or seven hours’ drive (locals say they do it in five), it’s a unique, ravishing collection of camps and lodges in the middle of a nowhere. Doubles from £150.

Travel Information

Currency is the Namibian dollar. Namibia is one hour ahead of GMT. Windhoek has a semi-arid climate with mild winters and very hot summers. Temperatures in the summer (December to March) can reach well over 30°C, while the winter months (June to August), can range from 6°C to 23°C.

Getting There - Air Namibia (airnamibia.com.na) flies daily to Windhoek from Frankfurt, with feeder flights with British Airways from London Heathrow.

Getting around - Vulkan Ruine Tours (vulkan-ruine-tours.com.na) organises tailored city tours of Windhoek.

Car hire is essential for anybody going outside of Windhoek under his or her own steam. Fuel costs about two-thirds of what it does in the UK. Gravel roads in Namibia are good, but be ready for punctures. Bear in mind that outside of town refuelling may be a problem – be prepared.

ASCO (ascocarhire.com) is a flourishing Namibian business with 250 vehicles. It will pick you up at the airport to collect your car and give you advice on driving. 24-hour support. From £50 per day

Resources - Namibia Tourism Board namibiatourism.com.na Online resource to assist with planning a trip to Namibia.

Further reading - My Hungry Heart by Antoinette de Chavonnes Vrugt (Venture). Currently available in southern Africa, but it’s a nice read with evocative pictures and practical recipes, drawn from author’s own experience as a passionate cook.

Where to eat

Hotel Heinitzburg Heinitzburg Street, Luxury Hill, Windhoek, 00 264 61 249 597, heinitzburg.com. The Relais & Châteaux hotel’s restaurant serves modern German cuisine that relies heavily on Namibian game and seafood that chef Tibor Raith sometimes catches himself on trips to the coast. About £30 per head including wine. (See also Where to stay)

Fusion Corner of Simpson and Beethoven Street,Windhoek West, fusionamibia.blogspot.com. A friendly restaurant, with influences from all over Africa and the Caribbean. From £12 per head

Joe’s Beerhouse 160 Nelson Mandela Avenue, Eros Suburb. Carnivores love it for the flesh on offer, but it’s a meet-up place for travellers where you can put back a few beers and swap stories about snakes and punctures. You don’t book. From £15 per head.

La Marmite 383 Independence Avenue. Drop in café/restaurant with a Cameroon-born chef-patron. Good, unpretentious cooking from £7.

NICE (Namibian Institute of Culinary Excellence) 2 Mozart Street, 00 264 61 300 710, nice.co.na. A catering college, where supervised students work out their apprenticeships. The cooking ranges from kingklip escabeche to steam pudding via oryx steaks with onion sauce.

Xwama Orango Street, Katutura. Ethnic Namibian cooking: mopane worms, mahangu porridge, dried spinach, free-range chicken (including claws) that you eat with your fingers. From £7 a head.

Food Glossary

Biltong

A cured meat from raw fillets of meat cut into strips following the grain of the muscle, or flat pieces sliced across the grain. It is similar to beef jerky.

Kalahari truffles

The nutritious, protein-rich fruiting body of an underground fungus. Their taste is similar to that of porcini mushrooms.

Kudu

Extremely lean game meat, similar to venison, with a mild gamey/liver-like flavour.

Mahangu

or pearl millet, is the major staple food crop produced in Namibia.

Mopane worms

The caterpillar form of the Mopane Emperor moth. An important source of protein for millions of indigenous Southern Africans.

Food and Travel Review

Twice the size of California, Namibia’s landscape veers from desert to dustbowl, from savannah to bush. Rocky outcrops: conical, sawn-off or jumbled volcanic boulders create surreal lunar patterns across the horizon. It’s arid, underpopulated and beautiful.

Twist the lens and details emerge. The sage veldt carpet reveals a wispy pile of bushman grass rooted in oxblood sand. Cypress spikes signal farmsteads, windmills water. Social weaver bird nests decorate telegraph poles. Ground squirrels scuttle across gravel tracks. Elegant kudu hurdle fences. Filling stations punctuate the hours of a cross-country journey where time, not space, marks the distance between stops.

Zoom in on its capital Windhoek. Backed by the bare Khomas Hochland Mountains it looks flat and provincial. In close-up, it changes. Luxury ‘schloss-lets’, dating from German rule at the end of the 19th century, dot Luxury Hill. Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and Wagner Streets form a network of des res roads. Its new State House, built by North Koreans, could pass for an astrophysics observatory. In the north of the city Katutura township translates roughly as ‘the place where nobody wants to live’, but it’s no favela.

Namibia’s population, a patchwork of tribes, immigrants, coloureds and whites is less than Greater Manchester’s. About half are Owambo, Bantu settlers from the north who arrived in the 16th century. Another eight per cent are Hereros, who enjoy an heroic status for fighting Teutonic colonisers that threatened to force them onto a reservation and ‘cleansed’ them for their resistance. The emptiness of the country helps cauterize racial wounds. Survival trumps ideological ‘-isms’. Living here demands compromise.

SilverSand Farm lies an hour’s drive from the capital, off the Trans Kalahari Highway. It’s quite small, about 9,000 hectares. Marco Seefeldt breeds cattle: Charolais and Brahmans. Gina, his partner and mother of their two young chidren, runs the farm. She milks her Jersey cows to make her own butter and cream, keeps a pen full of fattening pigeons, a pigsty, poultry and a vegetable patch. Their livestock coexists with the game. ‘We lose calves and sheep to cheetahs every year,’ Marco admits. The farm bolsters its income taking in trophy hunters – but no more than 15 a year. According to Gina every bit of any hunted animal they kill gets eaten. ‘The bones go to make soup; we braai [barbecue] the prime cuts or dry them for biltong and make mince from the rest; the dogs get the scraps.’

Gina’s cold-smoked oryx fillet, reddish-brown and still moist, is perfection. ‘I rub it with coarse sea salt, brown sugar, red wine, curry powder, bay leaf and crushed juniper berries, turning it twice a day for three days,’ she explains. ‘Then, wash off the salt and smoke it.’ Her fuel is camelthorn, a unique hardwood, dense like ebony, with a tap root that burrows up to 60 feet underground to find water.

Gina keeps a copy of My Hungry Heart in her living room. Its author, cookery writer Antoinette de Chavonnes Vrugt, confesses that neither her mother nor her grandmother were cooks. They relied on African servants, like many of their generations. Self-taught, Antoinette runs a catering company from her Windhoek home.

While her dentist husband Chris braais marinated steaks over an open fire, Antoinette adds the finishing touches to a pot of Kalahari truffles simmered with white wine and cream. She describes them as the ‘bushman’s potatoes’. ‘In season (after rain) people sell them by the roadside for a few dollars a bag,’ she explains. Their scent, closer to ceps, is stronger when fresh, but she scrubs, blanches and freezes them for the cool, dry winters.

‘This is a harsh country,’ she says, ‘not for softies. We don’t have much fresh produce.’ It’s hard to reconcile oneself to her words when the family’s pet meerkat is sipping Coke from a wine glass.

But she’s right. Gina, who walks barefoot around her farm, has trodden on scorpions twice: ‘For two days it’s like your feet are on fire and then the pain goes away.’ What doesn’t kill you…

Braais are a male preserve. Chris can grill a slab of oryx an inch thick in less time than it takes him to fill a tooth. Abs, an African guide in the NamibRand, says his people cook meat for longer: ‘We like goat and beef well-done. We’ll eat springbok, oryx or kudu medium, but ostrich must be cooked through.’

Back in Windhoek, Joe’s Beerhouse, on Nelson Mandela avenue – the city’s main drag – ups the protein machismo ante. Its Bushman’s Sosatie (aka kebab), skewered blocks of beef, chicken, zebra, kudu and crocodile on a platter with a fried maize-meal cake and chilli sauce, gives a red-blooded rush only beer can dampen. Joe’s is ‘Hard Rock Café meets Trader Vic’s’. It has tables under thatch parasols and a Mini Cooper perched on a roof. The Windhoek lager is good and boutique beers by a new microbrewery, Camelthorn, even better.

In Katutura township, pubs are shebeens with names like Love Bar and African Dream. Eateries are kapana stands selling beef or ox liver barbecued to order. Telegraph cable reels serve as butchers’ blocks; women seated on boxes sell mahangu (pearl millet flour), dried river fish and dried wild spinach. Together they form a diet that’s about survival. Antoinette’s ‘not for softies’ resonates here, where half the population is unemployed.

The township has its own moonshine: tombo, home-made rum and ombike, more like schnapps, that costs N$25 (£2.50) a jar. Oshikundu, slightly cloudy, looks as menacing. Made from fermented mahangu, it’s mildly alcoholic and refreshing.

Most guests at the Relais & Châteaux Hotel Heinitzburg would think twice before deserting Windhoek’s Luxury Hill for a plate of pap – maizemeal porridge and mopane worms – or the scrumptious stewed mutton and gravy sold in Soweto Market, or a vetkoek doughnut wrapped in a square of The Namibian. They would plump for an Asara Avalon pinotage to accompany their medallions of eland with polenta. Owner Beate Raith’s little castle proffers the spoor of luxury, before she cuts her well-heeled clients loose to fend for themselves in the bush. Her underground wine cellar is the haunt of ministers, Russian oligarchs and Chinese who go there to carve out deals.

Son Tibor Raith, graduate of the three-star Bareiss in the Black Forest, chefs. His asparagus claims to be ‘the best in the world’ – and it’s not far off. His Walvis Bay oysters are also ‘the best in the world’ – and they’re sweet and creamy. He drives to the coast to snorkel for crawfish. By law he can only catch seven at a time, he explains, but so can his mother and friends.

NICE – the National Institute for Culinary Education – is arguably the nicest place to dine in Windhoek. Like Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen, it doubles as a training restaurant and a commercial business. Set up to supply cooks to the country’s multiplying game lodges, it exceeds its brief.

It doesn’t feel like a school, more like the public rooms at a resort. On a Saturday night, the dining room is packed. Mojo Blues Electric Band plays a gig in an inner courtyard lit by oil lamps. From the kitchen, samosas, satays and polpette on sticks go to the brokers, plates of sushi to the bar and pan-fried oryx loin with onion gravy to the fine diners.

Sepia-tinted photographs showing white-jacketed students line the walls. The photographer, Stephan Brückner, set up NICE in a house his family owned. It’s a spin-off from Wolwedans, camps and lodges, on the NamibRand Nature Reserve created by his father, Albi. Stretching 80 kilometres north to south, the NamibRand was once a wasteland of failed commercial farms worn out by overgrazing; now it is coming back to life as a haven for the oryx and springbok. It plays host to a mystery. Seen from the air the veldt is pocked with thousands of bare patches, ‘fairy circles’ each a few metres across. Are they traces of meteor showers; the work of termites? Science can’t explain them.

A mission statement in Stephan’s office reads ‘Values not rules’. It’s a philosophy that encourages lateral thinking. Isolated, Wolwedans receives two food deliveries a week. Not enough rain falls to grow crops, so he treats and recycles water from the lodges and his staff quarters for growing herbs and vegetables in raised beds and polytunnels, anything from rocket to carrots and leeks.

Namibia’s giant meat corporation, MeatCo, claims ‘more than half of Namibians make a living off cattle farming, either directly or indirectly’. It’s an irony that two-thirds of the country’s vegetables are imported – but turning around the dependence on South Africa is possible. NICE buys its raw materials from Fruit and Veg City. A wholesale chainstore, it sources produce within Namibia. Guavas, white radish and avocadoes on its shelves prove the land is fertile.

A retired Shell executive, Allan Walkden-Davis has planted a vineyard at Neuras an hour’s drive from Wolwedans, on the edge of the desert. According to one wine guru, his Namib Red, a shirazmerlot blend is an ‘absolutely amazing, stunning wine’.

If you head into Windhoek along the C26 from Walvis Bay you have to stop at a guard post. After you’ve shown him your driving licence he asks two questions: ‘Do you have beer? Do you have fresh meat?’ If the answer is ‘no’, he lets you pass. At the time the questions seem harmless, even amusing. Was he perhaps hungry or thirsty? Then the penny drops. Namibia is safer, more developed than some other African nations, but it isn’t so rich that it can take food and drink for granted. That said, bottles of unfiltered Camelthorn lager in the icebox of your 4x4 are fine beers that should never fall into the hands of a traffic cop.