Wilderness Hoanib Skeleton Coast Camp

In the remote Hoanib River valley on the eastern edge of the Skeleton Coast in Namibia’s Kaokoveld region, Wilderness Hoanib Skeleton Coast Camp occupies a landscape of almost geological austerity where desert-adapted lion, elephant, black rhino, and the elusive brown hyena navigate a river system that flows above ground for only a few weeks a year, sustaining wildlife populations through the ability to find subsurface water in the dry riverbed for the rest of the year. The camp’s six tented suites are positioned on the elevated bank of the Hoanib, with a design of minimal footprint appropriate to the remoteness and ecological sensitivity of a landscape that receives fewer than a thousand visitors a year. Access is by charter flight to the camp’s private airstrip, and the approach over the Skeleton Coast’s fog-draped dunes is itself a form of arrival experience unlike any other in Africa.

Game drives in the Hoanib concession focus on the desert-adapted wildlife that is unique to this ecosystem — the famous desert elephants whose ability to walk extraordinary distances between water sources has produced behaviours not observed in elephant populations elsewhere in Africa, the desert lion prides whose territory covers thousands of square kilometres, and the desert black rhino whose tracking in this terrain is among the most technically demanding wildlife experience available on the continent. Walking with the camp’s experienced guides in the Hoanib riverbed provides a different quality of encounter with the desert landscape and its animal inhabitants. The camp’s cook sources whatever the Kaokoveld and the Skeleton Coast can supply, supplemented by provisions flown in with the camp’s weekly flight.

Wilderness Hoanib Skeleton Coast Camp’s operation is conducted in partnership with the Kunene region’s Himba and Damara communities, whose traditional knowledge of the desert landscape informs the camp’s conservation and wildlife monitoring work and whose cultural heritage provides an important dimension of the human geography of a region that has been inhabited, however sparsely, for tens of thousands of years.