Namibia

The iconic red dunes of Sossusvlei — some rising to 325 meters, making them among the world's tallest — are best seen at dawn when the light carves spectacular shadow lines across the orange faces. Deadvlei, a white clay pan studded with the black skeletons of 900-year-old camel thorn trees, is one of the most photographed landscapes on earth.

Built around a vast white salt pan visible from space, Etosha is Namibia's premier wildlife destination, where waterholes are floodlit at night for extraordinary close-up encounters with lions, rhinos, and elephants drinking in the darkness. The pan itself — 130 kilometers long — shimmers like a mirage in the heat, giving the park its name, which means 'Great White Place' in the Ondonga language.

One of the world's most forbidding and beautiful coastlines, the Skeleton Coast's 500-kilometer stretch of cold Atlantic surf and fog-shrouded dunes is littered with the wrecks of ships and the bones of whales. The northern Skeleton Coast Park, accessible only by private fly-in safari, harbours enormous Cape fur seal colonies, desert-adapted lions, and elephants that roam the dunes to the sea.

The second-largest canyon in the world and the largest in Africa, Fish River Canyon is 160 kilometers long, up to 27 kilometers wide, and drops 549 meters to the canyon floor. The five-day hiking trail along the canyon bottom is one of Africa's classic wilderness walks, completed between May and September when the temperature is manageable.

A landscape of ancient volcanic mountains, dry riverbeds, and vast plains in northwest Namibia, Damaraland is home to the world's largest population of free-ranging desert-adapted elephants as well as desert-adapted black rhinos. The Brandberg Mountain holds the famous White Lady rock painting — a 2,000-year-old San Bushman panel among the most significant in southern Africa.

A diamond-rush town built by German colonists in 1908 and abandoned by 1956, Kolmanskop's neat Germanic houses are now half-submerged in Namib sand that pours through broken windows and fills rooms to the ceiling. The eerie beauty of these sand-filled interiors has made Kolmanskop one of the most photographed abandoned places in the world.