The bush pilots that bring the world's oldest desert to life

The first time I travelled to Namibia, in April 2024, I rented a 4x4 Toyota truck for a road trip across the country — as I’d been told that was the best way to approach the vastness of the landscape and to appreciate its marvels of sand and rock. After eight-hour days of sloshing around the gravel roads, I’d arrive at one of the fantastic hotels I’d booked, too fried to do much exploring and missing out on whatever activities might have been on offer.

What I did find everywhere along the way, waving goodbye to me when I left one place in the morning and welcoming me at the next place in the evenings, looking fresh and relaxed at each point, was an English couple on their ninth visit to the country. I soon learnt that they had booked a Cessna safari to collect them from one property and deliver them to the next with minimal fuss and, as I was to learn, far better views than I was getting on the ground. Immediately, I became determined to return and do the full Denys Finch Hatton-style survey from the air.

My goodness, I am glad I did. At once, I noticed the difference in perspective and the way that modes of locomotion affect our mindset. I’d spent the entirety of my Namibian road trip in an almost discombobulated state; now, high in my Cessna seat, I felt much lighter — buoyant in every way. For the purposes of this trip, I worked with Wilderness Air, an operation run in conjunction with the Wilderness hospitality brand, which will also transport travellers to properties belonging to andBeyond, Zannier and so on. It made sense for me to stay within the Wilderness envelope, however, visiting the brand’s properties in a variety of locations to see the range of landscapes, wildlife and experiences Namibia has to offer — and to cover a great deal more territory than before.

I began with a stay at Wilderness’s Little Kulala camp. On arriving at Windhoek airport, the team there helped me, and a few others — an American couple on honeymoon and two friends on a ladies’ trip — into one of the fleet of 1980s Cessna 208 Grand Caravans, 14-seaters with a range of about 1,000 kilometres (about 620 miles). After landing at a long, straight strip of red sand in the centre of a wide sand valley to drop off the honeymooners, the pilot took us up again, banking over the famous serpentine shapes of the dunes at Sossusvlei to drop us at the airstrip near Little Kulala.

Once I had settled into my recently renovated tented room and resettled my nerves with Champagne, the reality of where I was and what I was doing overwhelmed me, as did the endlessness of the landscape around me. It may be the way that Cessna travel reveals the expanse, but, in that moment at Little Kulala, I felt very intensely just how unbelievably small I am.

In many ways, Namibia is a great place to think outside of human time, outside of human scale (although testimonies to that scale exist here, too, with rock carvings in the north-east of the country going back 10,000 years). Standing on my cabin’s deck, looking out on the vastness of the landscape, it felt so clear that everything is so much bigger and older and more important than us and our worries, in part because this canvas has remained unchanged for so long.

The Namib desert, the oldest in the world, goes back at the very least some 55 million years (making it about 10 times as ancient as the Sahara, for example). This desert is so venerable that there are dinosaur footprints in it. In Namibia, you begin to see things on geological time — then, when the curtain of the day is pulled and the immensity of stars is revealed, on a planetary scale. It is impossible not to come in direct contemplation with how very, very tiny we are; how diminutive, even, our solar system is.

The next morning, Wilderness arranged for me to take in the scenery from a hot-air balloon. I am, unfortunately, terrified of heights, so I spent much of the ride hunkered in the bottom of the basket, holding my camera above my head to capture some of the views (absolutely spectacular, I’m told) as the sun rose, casting its rays sidelong through the dust and sand. Apparently, it was one of the most incredible sunrises I didn’t quite see.

Later, firmly on the ground, we drove to the monumental red sand dunes of Sossusvlei. In the heart of the park, we passed through a cove protected on all sides by mountainous dunes, then entered the little salt clearing where ancient trees stand in mute ceremony: Deadvlei, made famous by Tarsem’s fantasy film The Fall and now an Instagram favourite. The deep ochre red of the dunes is testament to their age, the iron content in the sand given time to rust and rust and rust over millennia.

At Little Kulala, I climbed back on board one of Wilderness’s Grand Caravans and flew into the centre of the country, where I changed planes, to a Cessna 210C. I would spend much of my time in these four-seaters (including the pilot), each of which is named for an animal found in the bush: Lion, Kudu, Cheetah and so on. Now, picture, if you will, a car made in the early to mid 1980s and driven over great distances every day since. The patina to the interior knobs and chrome and instruments of the 210C is fairly consistent with that, as is the design, with faux wood grain and chrome ash trays, cantilevered windows and analog instruments.

It was on these plane rides that I thought about the personality type it takes to become a bush pilot in Namibia. There is, on the one hand, a little bit of a carnival barker to these men — playing for jokes, entertaining the passengers as they go through their safety briefings and so on — but there is an aspect of the mechanic, too, the MacGyver, and something of a loner, being way out in the back of beyond. I loved chatting with these men, Tinashe and Adam, William and Xander and the rest. Many of them are from southern Africa, although not all. Some are super fastidious; some have the ease of mastery; most of them are quite boyish. Each of them told me stories of falling in love with planes and flying in their adolescence.

Viewed from above, in my regular Cessna hops, the trippy topography of Namibia could have been the visuals from a 1990s Björk music video: origami patterns of canyons and the long, undulating ribbons of dunes running out to a plain of limitless, desolate white rock, then the fractal, encrusted shapes of long-ago water run-offs. If you have been on a safari in the east of southern Africa or rambled around in the back of a Land Cruiser through the Serengeti in Tanzania or Kruger National Park in South Africa and perhaps begun to think that all safaris are somewhat the same, Namibia will clean your slate. The deserts, the rock formations and the sand dunes are so unlike those I have ever seen anywhere else and the rare sightings of lions and elephants and the like bring with them an extra giddiness, a thrill, in part because you are encountering these animals in such a strange, surreal context.

My second stop on the tour was the Desert Rhino camp — once the headquarters of the rhino rangers of the region and still a great place to see these singular animals — recently reopened after a brand spanking new renovation. The sandstone and basalt mountains around the camp are some 500 million years old. The plains are flecked with red rock boulders and, infrequently, the dusty sage of a euphorbia, shooting up like a bouquet of jointed string beans. It is intensely beautiful and utterly inhospitable — and yet there are clear traces here, there, everywhere, of where our ancestors lived and moved.

From Desert Rhino, I flew toward the north-western coast, to Hoanib Skeleton Coast and its cluster of tawny-coloured tented cabins. This might be the time to say how misleading the term ‘tented cabin’ can be on safari: my ‘tent’ at Hoanib was among the most luxurious accommodations available anywhere in the world. The views, the comfort: sublime; and the food, at each of the camps, at every meal, was as good or better than at any hotel.

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It was on our adventure out to the Skeleton Coast that I saw an entire parade of animals. A feasting lion, playful elephants, curious giraffes and, by the sea, more seals than I could have ever imagined. On my last night in Namibia, as I sat in a canvas chair in front of the fire, watching the sky turn cotton candy and then mauve, I noticed how much more free and clear I felt. My mind seemed somehow rewired, wiped free from the noise of ‘real’ life. Then, an event, a revelation, occurred: the moon rose in the desert. Something so fundamental, it appeared to me as a spectacle, a symbol of the divine. How had I become inured to this magic, this sensation? How is it that I take any of this for granted? How have I lived so far from this experience, happening here all the time, for so long? It is only a few plane rides away.

Wilderness can organise seven-night itineraries from £7,675 per person, based on two people sharing on an inclusive basis. The price includes two nights each at Wilderness Little Kulala and Desert Rhino camps, followed by three nights at Hoanib Skeleton Coast camp, as well as return air transfers from Windhoek. Visit their website for more information and to book.

Christopher Wallace is a writer and photographer. His biography of the late photographer Peter Beard, ‘Twentieth-Century Man: The Wild Life of Peter Beard’, was published by Ecco press. Before going freelance, Wallace was the US Editor of Mr Porter and the Executive Editor of Interview Magazine. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Paris Review, and on Substack, among others. Chris was born and raised in Los Angeles and once upon a time made a few short films that won some awards at festivals. Longer ago than that, even, he played college football, before eventually quitting the team to write poetry. He still makes similarly poor career decisions — his words, not ours.