Etosha National Park may best be known for the large concentrations of game that gather around the watering holes at the end of the dry season when water elsewhere is scarce, but it’s also a pleasant safari experience simply driving around the dirt roads. Etosha is Namibia’s largest and most popular park. And for good reason — the roads are easy to drive and accessible even by 2WD vehicles, and wild animals are abundant. (It also helps that Etosha is so close to South Africa that many South Africans favor a quick trip here for their vacation!)
Elephant, Cheetah, Rhinoceros, Lion, and Leopard. It may not be a true “big 5”, which would swap out cheetah for buffalo, (fyi – buffalo isn’t present in this park) but it was our “big 5” on our first day. Etosha National Park was a place both Ross and I were excited to visit long before we ever came to Africa. (And seeing cheetah is way better than seeing buffalo anyway if you ask me!) The wildlife in the park was abundant and we enjoyed the four days we spent driving through the savannah, grassland and forests, as well as our periodic stops at the famous waterholes. We enjoyed camping for three nights with access to a floodlit waterhole within walking distance from our campsite so that we could see the game that came in for an evening drink, and we enjoyed clean showers and nice campsites, both luxuries we often did not have access to. While Etosha has much to offer, certainly a highlight for us was the incredibly tame birds found inside the campgrounds and subsequently feeding a flock of 12 different species of birds a few morsels of food may have been the best part about staying there. But the numerous Barn Owls and Southern White-faced Owls at night were a close second.
Grey Go-away-bird 
Yellow-billed Hornbill 
Cape Starling 
Sociable Weaver 
Sociable Weaver nest (they are social!) 
Violet Woodhoopoe
Bare-cheeked Babbler 
Red-billed Hornbill
Making friends. Don’t judge. 
Barn Owl 
Southern White-faced Owl
We never saw the large animal gatherings around waterholes that are supposedly so massive they “must be seen to be believed,” but we still had a fantastic time and saw plenty of wildlife. Etosha is one of those places I could visit again and again.
We enjoyed drinking wine with dinner and beer at lunch. We had so few bird targets to see that Namibia felt like a vacation. We were on safari and were appreciating the megafauna that this continent is best known for.
Fork-tailed Drongo 
Blacksmith Lapwing 
Yellow-billed Hornbill 
Juvenile Bateleur 
Crested Barbet 
Red-billed Spurfowl 
But that’s not to say we didn’t have a few bird targets to see! We made a special stop before coming to Etosha to scramble across a few boulders in search of Angola Cave Chat and followed that up by staking out various watering holes in search of Cinderella Waxbill. The views from far northwestern Namibia were among some of my favorites. This is an area that remains seemingly untouched and during our hike up the boulders I couldn’t see a single human settlement as I scanned the horizon. It was remote in a way that feels exciting and it was breathtakingly beautiful.
