There's something about Namibia's FM radio that brings out the Brylcreem and Bobbie Sox in a soul. It's fifties to the core in its play list and the tone of its genteel talk shows. Like the architecture of Windhoek and Swakopmund, it comes from another, more innocent, era: Art Deco of the airwaves with an essence of African Outback.

"Last week Mrs Swart from Grootfontein wanted to swap her two Retriever puppies for a baby's pram," says the record spinner in her mellow stooptalk voice. "Today, we found a Mrs Frankenfeld in Swakop who has a pram for her and wants to meet the puppies. Mrs Swart has agreed to bring them through next week."

This is national radio, but it feels like a huge, unseen, comforting hand of communication stretched all over this vast dry country of only 1.8 million souls. Someone is going to drive a thousand miles to swap a brace of puppies for a pram. Only in Namibia. Or maybe also in Coober Pedy, Australia...

My wife Julienne and I are heading south from Windhoek on the B1 Highway and soon we're going to veer westwards on a much smaller road called the C24 to the NamibRand Nature Reserve, to a place called Wolwedans (Dance of the Wolves) in particular. We find ourselves, at sunset, on top of a red-gold dune crested with tufts of Oryx-tail grass, the wind having cut mysterious ripples through the sandbanks. We look down at the main camp, a row of wood and canvas structures on rolling lines of sand.

"It's going to be cold tonight. I don't know if canvas will be enough," someone says as we check in. But once we're settled into our impeccable chalet, with its corrugated iron roof, copper piping in the shower, wooden floors, roll-down canvas sides and large verandah with benches (complete with midnight mouse skittering on the boards in search of scraps), it all looks to be pretty warm and secure. Now where's that welcome drink?

Our guide is Canaan Ncube, an Ndebele who hails from Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. Canaan drives a Land Rover called Stretch. He used to work in the Victoria Falls area, but wanted to see more of Southern Africa. So he put his qualifications out on the Internet and the Wolwedans job came through. How does a scion of King Mzilikazi like the desert?

"I like it fine," he says, full of confidence. On the drive later, we discover why: Canaan Ncube has the wilderness pretty much down pat. He listens, he studies and now he knows. Canaan's game drive is right up there with the best. Out here, you can't just show your guests one of the Big Five and prattle on. You have to know a bit more about flora like the camelthorn trees, and God's smaller creatures too - dung beetles and harvester ants and such.

Oh yes, those dreaded harvesters. There are bald spots all over the prairie out at Wolwedans. Canaan says they're fairy circles. Tourists can adopt one if they want - at thirty quid a throw. You get a clay plaque with the relevant number on it, which is placed in the middle of the circle. Then you get a certificate to take home. And, yes, you can come back and visit your fairy circle whenever you want to. Some say it's the work of thousands of small alien space ships - their inter-galactic skidmarks, perhaps. Others say it's the work of harvester ants cleaning out the seeds in their immediate radius.

We move on to Sossusvlei Wilderness Camp, where we meet our new guide, Isaiah Iiyambo, a former yuppie-type sales executive from Windhoek. "As soon as I set foot in the Namib, I was addicted," he says. "The heat, the cold, the silence, the scenery - I just love it." On a late afternoon walk across the gravel plains where the grass has turned lemon-yellow, we also meet a rather large female ostrich. She comes bounding towards us and we run away up a hill and hide behind rocks. She droops her feathers and slopes off into the distance. Later, around the fireside, we find out her name is Christine.

"Yes, Christine won the Employee of the Month award recently," we are told. "She laid a lovely egg for an Italian guest out in the back of the parking lot."

At Sesriem Village (the entrance to the dune kingdom of Sossusvlei), I'm filling up the fuel tank and having a couple of tyres repaired when a vicious updraft of wind brings an 80-year-old British tourist flapping past me. He makes it to the Gents and hangs on to the door handle in desperation, finally swinging inside. We will meet again later.

We're heading north to Swakopmund via The Hardap and a town called Solitaire. The man behind the counter at Solitaire does not look happy, although all 20-odd tables in his restaurant are full of munching Germans. Outside, the winds have turned nasty and anything that isn't nailed down in this minuscule, middle-of-everywhere settlement is well on its way to Cape Town by now.

"Good business today?" I remark and order a couple of beers. You have to drink beer in Namibia - it's almostthe law because it's so very good.

"Good business? No. They came by bus and they're eating their packed bus lunches. All I've sold them is coffee and a couple of strudels. This is not good business."

We take that thought with us, pushing on into the Hardap, a place where air conditioning comes to die. During World War II, Germans Henno Martin, Hermann Korn and their good dog Otto hid out here to avoid internment. Henno wrote The Sheltering Desert after that, and, I must say, old Otto comes off rather well in it. This is a country for fearless, resolute dogs.

Swakopmund looms. We go straight to Sam's Giardino, where a certain Sam Egger and his mountain dog Mr Einstein are practically our favourite Swakoppians. Sam, who comes from Switzerland, runs an immaculate guesthouse and Mr Einstein is his marketing manager. We go out for walks in the evenings with master and dog, the mist swirling about, and it's not long before we're checking the property pages of the local paper.

After all, who doesn't want to move here? Swakop has to be the best-designed coastal town in Africa. It's like a Lego set someone left lying in the desert, a German Lego set. In the mornings, the sweet seductive aroma of pastries wafts past your nose as you stroll down the streets of the town centre, shortly to be followed by rich coffee smells as the percolators come on. And then in the evenings you catch the hops in the air as the local Hansa brewery makes its presence known.

We are invited to share the sunset with the youthful braumeister of Swakopmund, Wilfried Hunsdorfer, and we toast the town from the brewery roof with a beady glass of ice-cold Tafel beer. I also drink a little toast to tomorrow's lunchtime challenge - the climbing of Mount Eisbein (delicious German pork knuckle) at the Swakopmund Brauhaus.

It's a mission, all right. But I'm brave and I make it to Base Camp (about one third of the way) before dropping my knife and fork and admitting defeat. The waitress is not impressed. "We serve German portions here," she says, clearing the table and bringing more beer.

We are intrigued by the work of Swakopmund painter Lizette Mubanga, in particular a piece where people are being flung about the desert by a very angry elephant.

"I actually saw this happen near Etosha Pan," Lizette assures us. And now we decide to track down the very elusive desert elephant, which is to be found on the way north. First, however, we discover that South African tourists have a very bad name up here in Namibia for driving their 4x4s just about anywhere they want, destroying ancient lichen fields and rare Damara tern nests in the process.

The local Department of Nature Conservation tells us that in times gone by, erring 4x4 drivers were made to pay "admission of guilt" fines if caught - less than 30 pounds. Those tiny fines were hardly ever paid. Nowadays, however, they've got a far niftier manner of dealing with lichen field lurkers: they just confiscate your spare wheel until you've shown proof of payment.

Cape Cross is good for photographs but reeks like the devil and is packed with bickering seals. We turn inland and stop off at the Houmoed (Be Courageous) General Dealer for Tafel. Six German off-road bikers in lurid leather are draped all over the porch, appearing particularly parched. They've come down all the way from Epupa Falls on their scramblers and they have no idea how strange they're looking right now.

Huab Lodge is owned by Jan and Suzie van der Reep and lies on an old hunter's farm that is slowly being brought back to wildlife. My kidneys are on fire from all the road riding, but Suzie plays mum and directs me to their hot spring, which is heaven to a hard traveller.

At supper, I meet the British tourist who flapped by me back at the Sesriem petrol station. It turns out he and his wife have been overlanding in a hire car all around the country, having a great time, getting totally lost, blown over and sort of just making it to various points on their loose itinerary. Imagine coming to Africa for the first time when you're 80, buying a road map, hiring a soft-shell car and hitting the road like it's London to Glasgow. That's something.

And the manner with which Jan sells his lodge in so many different ways is equally impressive.

"Have some Huab Chateau du Pump," he says, offering me a glass of water. "The Huab Doctor is blowing tonight - dress warm for the drive. Oh, you must try the Huab Devil Chicken." And when a moth falls into your wine glass, it's only a member of the Huab swimming team. I like Jan. He knows how to brand a thing.

But we don't get to meet Doetab, the legendary desert elephant who has made the lodge his headquarters in recent years. It appears he's wandered down the Huab River in a westerly direction and won't be back for a few weeks. Oh well. If you can't see the jumbo you can always have an encounter with a spitting cobra in the curio shop. Jan caught the snake in a black pipe and invites me along to photograph the release out in the bush.

"Thanks, but we've got another appointment with a dog down south," I say hastily and run away. It's true, however. After a night up at Etosha, I have to fly home. But Julie stays on at a farm near Otjiwarongo and meets an amazing American woman, an Anatolian sheepdog, a cheetah called Chewie, a bunch of Namibian farmers and a herd of goats. Somehow their fates were all intertwined. The cheetahs were eating the goats, which was forcing the farmers to shoot the cats. So Laurie Marker intervened, introduced the sheepdog to the goat farmers as security for their creatures and now the cheetah may just evade extinction. Or, at least, that was how Julie told it all to me when she walked in a few days later.

But I was busy reading an e-mail from the folks at Huab Lodge, all about the elusive desert elephant we never saw. "On Monday morning, the girls coming to work nearly walked right into Doetab. Somewhere along the line, he'd broken one of his tusks off so they didn't recognise him at first." Only in Namibia.

Johannesburg-based Chris Marais seldom misses an opportunity to point his car in the direction of unfamiliar places and their people.

Published in Travel Africa Edition Eighteen: Winter 2001/02. Text is subject to Worldwide Copyright (c)