namibia: tracking desert rhino

The chances are good, but this is tracking and not a viewing. Sightings are consistent without ever being promised.

What makes the odds good is the partnership behind the camp. It was set up in 2003 with the Save the Rhino Trust, whose trackers come from the local communities, patrol this unfenced country on foot and keep records of each animal.

They head out ahead of you at dawn, pick up fresh spoor and call your guide in once a rhino has been found. Three nights here gives you two full days to try, which is the real insurance against a blank morning.

The rhino are thinly spread across a vast concession, so expect long hours in an open vehicle on rough, dusty tracks before any walking begins, with giraffe, oryx, mountain zebra and sometimes desert-adapted elephant along the way.

Usually you meet the trackers the evening before for a briefing.

Next morning you leave early by 4WD while the tracking team works ahead on foot, and when they have a rhino your guide walks you in, slowly and in single file, stopping at a distance the trackers judge right for that animal.

The caution is practical: a black rhino's eyes are weak, so an observer 30 metres off is hard for it to detect, yet it hears and smells acutely.

The walking is over broken volcanic rock and gravel and can last anything from a short approach to a few hours, so you need to be steady on rough ground, not athletic. Wear sturdy closed shoes and a hat.

While you watch, the team records each animal's identity and condition for the Trust's database. The camp sets a minimum age for tracking on foot, so tell us children's ages early.

Different animal, different country, different rhythm.

In the Palmwag Concession you are after desert-adapted black rhino: browsers, often solitary, thinly spread across unfenced wilderness and found by hours of tracking.

Ongava, by contrast, is private land, roughly 30,000 hectares along the southern edge of Etosha, and both species live on it. Its white rhino eat grass, out in the open, and tend to go about in small groups, so they are the ones usually approached on foot, with an armed guide leading and a safety talk first.

Ongava's black rhino are more often seen after dark, at the floodlit waterhole below the lodge or from its hide, because black rhino are chiefly active at night. Ongava adds more besides: lion and elephant at the waterhole, and day trips into Etosha.

Putting the two together is the point of this route, the hard-won rhino first and the rhino-rich reserve second.

Not as it stands, and that is deliberate.

The three desert nights are on the NamibRand Nature Reserve, a private reserve of more than 200,000 hectares that shares a long boundary with the national park but lies south of the famous pans.

Sesriem, the gateway to Sossusvlei and Deadvlei, is about a two-hour drive from Wolwedans each way, and we recommend that guests who want the big dunes stay near Sesriem, for easy access to them.

What NamibRand gives you instead is the same red sand on private land, with drives and walks that follow the desert's ecology and some of the darkest night skies on record.

If Deadvlei is on your list, the clean answer is one or two nights at Sossusvlei before Wolwedans. Ask us and we will add them, and show you what it does to the rest of the route.

About as dark as skies get.

In 2012 the NamibRand reserve became Africa's first International Dark Sky Reserve, at the gold tier, the grade kept for places with little or no light pollution. Its nearest settlements are small and some 60 miles away, and its night sky was among the darkest measured at the time.

The moon matters more than the month. Around new moon the sky is at its darkest and the Milky Way at its clearest. A full moon lights the desert brightly, but washes the Milky Way out almost completely.

So if the stars are a priority, tell us, and we will try to set your Wolwedans nights close to a new moon.

Winter brings the clearest, most cloudless nights and also the coldest, often below freezing from June to August, so pack a proper jacket for the deck.

July to September.

We rate June to September highest for every stop on this route, and within that window July to September is the coolest stretch, which matters when the main activity is walking over open, shadeless gravel.

The dry months help the search too: water is scarce, so wildlife in Damaraland keeps close to the few springs, and at Ongava and in Etosha the animals come to the waterholes in numbers.

June is as good but colder at night.

May and October are workable shoulder months, though October climbs into the mid-thirties in Damaraland and higher in Etosha.

December to March gets our challenging rating for this trip: tracking on foot in that heat is hard work, rain lets the wildlife scatter, and cloud can spoil NamibRand's night skies. The compensations are a green desert, storm light, newborn antelope, good birding and quiet camps.