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Remarkable sound effects were emanating from the grounds of the Gondwana Travel Centre in Windhoek on Friday, 19 January. The noise of hammering and sawing mingled with peals of laughter as some 70 staffers deserted their desks and rolled up their sleeves for some manual work. It was an afternoon of teambuilding, the highlight of the entertaining exercise was a group project to construct small, portable vegetable gardens. All the effort was for a good cause: the little vegetable gardens were handed to the Mammadù Trust.

Aus is situated 125 km east of Lüderitz on the fringe of the Huib Plateau in the Namib Desert. If you make time for a closer look at this little village of 1,200 inhabitants (in 2011) you will discover a memorial stone at the riverbank next to the old railway station from German colonial times. The stone is a good two metres high, but there is no commemorative plaque... In whose honour was this monument erected? 

Leave it or go for it? When it comes to planning a trip and deciding on accommodation, TripAdvisor, the world's largest travel site is a popular source of information. Four of our lodges received the TripAdvisor Certificate of Excellence for the excellent reviews posted in 2017: Kalahari Farmhouse, The Delight Swakopmund, Namib Dune Star Camp and Eagle's Nest Chalets of our marketing partner Klein-Aus Vista.

The Gondwana Collection Namibia is gobsmacked by how many people have viewed its cheeky video clip on ‘shithole’ Namibia. In just ten days it has reached more than 670 million people all over the world – a prime example for the power of the internet and social media! And one of the most successful destination marketing campaigns for Namibia since independence in 1990.

“I am an expert on Prof. Gries, but certainly no Brandberg expert”, Dr Helge Kleifeld, a historian and geographer from Cologne in Germany remarked drily at the end of his three-day expedition to Königstein in the Brandberg Massif on 2 January this year. Accompanied by archaeologist Martina Trognitz and pilot Lukas Gehring he climbed the highest mountain in Namibia to commemorate the centenary of the first ascent by a European. The party who scaled the 2573 m peak on 2 January 1918 consisted of Prof. Ernst August Gries, Reinhard Maack and Georg Schulze.

It’s a scorching day in Etosha National Park. Azaro, a Belgian Shepherd dog, is on duty in the parched landscape. He is about to pass a sizable dense bush when he suddenly pauses for a moment, sniffs the air and then crawls underneath the bush to the other side. There he barks and sits. A small piece of raw ivory is lying between the dry leaves. Dog handler Bernd Brell praises the faithful four-legged detector dog and rewards him with a ball to play with.

The openbill, a species of stork almost sixty centimetres tall, delicately wades through the shallow water. When it scoops up a sea snail it deftly pulls the animal out of its hard shell. If a mussel cannot be cracked, the openbill drops it in a sunny spot on the riverbank where it will open eventually. Mussels are always deposited in the same spot. Currently such accumulations are found at the Chobe River Camp in the eastern parts of the Zambezi Region where openbills take advantage of the Chobe River’s low water level to forage for their favourite food.