Etosha National Park

Etosha National Park, translated as the ‘Place of Mirages’, ‘Land of Dry Water’ or the ‘Great White Place’, covers 22,270 sqkm consisting mostly of grassy plains around salt pans of over 5,000 sqkm. The largest of these pans, the Etosha Pan, can be classified as a saline desert in its own right.

The Etosha Pan lies in the Owambo Basin, on the north-western edge of the Namibian Kalahari Desert. Until three million years ago it formed part of a huge, shallow lake that was reduced to a complex of salt pans when the major river that fed it, the Kunene, changed course and began to flow to the Atlantic instead. If the lake existed today, it would be the third largest in the world.

This pan becomes a beautiful lake after heavy rains and attracts large flocks of pink candy-floss coloured flamingo. Etosha hosts a vast array of animals, including the Big Five, as well as giraffes, and rare and unusual species like the black-faced impala, Hartmann’s mountain zebra or the smallest antelope in the world, the Damara dikdik.