News

The Baines Vetcare Mobile Animal Clinic visits remote towns around the country, sets up base and invites community members to bring their pets for free spay and neuter services. Their main focus is to help pets from low or no income households in areas where no veterinary services are available. At the beginning of June, Dr Ian Baines and his team visited the Eastern Zambezi Region. Gondwana supported their cause and invited them to stay at their lodges.

A White-backed Vulture was fitted with the yellow plastic tags J121 on the wings on 16 October 2016 as a nestling together with 13 conspecifics at farm Aris south of Windhoek. In 2017, J121 was spotted at Okonjima Lodge, 221 km north of where he had hatched. Roughly one month later he appeared at the vulture restaurant maintained by NARREC in Brakwater near Windhoek. This just goes to show that vultures travel considerable distances in search of food. Vultures in Namibia, in southern Africa and on the African continent as a whole are threatened by extinction.

Can you imagine producing only one jar of waste per year? Whether you believe it or not, it’s possible, even with a stylish lifestyle. Bea Johnson is the shining example for a Zero Waste lifestyle. “The Priestess of Waste-Free Living” as The New York Times puts it, will visit Namibia next week and host inspirational talks in Windhoek and Swakopmund. Gondwana Collection is one of the proud sponsors supporting her stay in Namibia. 

Gondwana Collection Namibia is proud to announce that Kalahari Anib Lodge has become a TripAdvisor Certificate of Excellence Hall of Fame winner. The lodge qualified for the Hall of Fame after earning Certificates of Excellence for the past five consecutive years. The award celebrates excellence in hospitality and is given only to establishments that consistently receive great traveller reviews on TripAdvisor over a 12 month period. 

Unexpected rains in the middle of May also hit Namibia’s central coast, flooding streets at Walvis Bay and Swakopmund. Angola and Namibia agreed to a joint-development on a trans-frontier nature park on the Kunene River, along the common border. The Lufthansa subsidiary, Eurowings, introduced its first flight from Munich to Windhoek this month. Namibian scientist Japie van Zyl made his home country proud when launching the NASA Marslander Insight Mission in California, USA. According the Namibia Statistics Agency, inflation ticked slightly upwards to 3.6 percent in April, compared to 3.5 percent in March.

It is the third consecutive year that a Gondwana Collection property has reached the final of the Responsible Tourism Awards (RTA) and the first time to win the award. The Namib Desert Lodge scooped the prestigious award in the Accommodation Establishment category. The winners were announced today (30 May 2018) at the Namibia Tourism Expo in Windhoek. This year’s RTA criteria are based on the theme for the 2018 Tourism Expo: “Conservation – small things matter.”