Desert Rhino Camp

Prolonged drought and rampant poaching had reduced Damaraland's black rhino population to fewer than 40 animals by 1982. To combat this, Save the Rhino Trust, three community conservancies and Wilderness Safaris came together to create Desert Rhino Camp and, in turn, cut poaching in the area by 80 per cent and helped build the largest free-roaming population of black rhino left anywhere outside a national park.

The camp sits inside the 583,000-hectare Palmwag Concession, rebuilt in 2024 into six wood-and-canvas suites on raised decks, each with a cushioned outdoor platform doubling as a star bed. Solar panels supply all the power, solar geysers heat the water, and reverse osmosis filtration removes the need for a single plastic bottle.

Save the Rhino Trust's own community trackers, most of them Damara, pick up fresh spoor at dawn and lead guests on foot for hours across rock and scrub until they find a rhino. Desert-adapted elephant, Hartmann's mountain zebra, gemsbok and the occasional desert lion share the same 583,000 hectares, and the plains themselves are scattered with welwitschia, a plant that can live for over a thousand years and grows nowhere outside this stretch of coastal Namibia and Angola.