I do love a good self-drive journey – it’s the endless open miles and that sense of liberation you feel when you’re brave enough to go it alone. Guides are great at dispensing insightful information and dealing with logistics, but there’s nothing so thrilling (or perhaps so cost-effective) as taking the helm and becoming captain of your own personal adventure.

And so, with that in mind, I bundled my two infants (Sam, my one year old baby, and Dale, my 37-year-old husband) into the seats of my rented 4WD. Ahead of us was the vast wilderness of Namibia…

Don’t get me wrong, I’m no Indiana Jones. I’m just a normal mom who likes shopping and driving a small car on nicely paved roads. I neither know how to drive up the face of a dune, nor, I suspect, have the bravado to keep a pride of circling lions at bay with a flaming torch. In fact, I can’t even make a campfire – that’s what my husband is for. But you don’t need specialist driving skills to explore much of Namibia on your own. Why? The roads are mostly good, the routes are fairly straightforward (especially if you take a GPS) and the few people you do meet are very helpful.

Many of the specialist car hire firms will rent you something appropriately tough, with all the bits and pieces you need to survive an extended trip deep into the middle of nowhere. And parts of Namibia certainly fit that bill. Its vast deserts, dunes and flat stony planes look for all the world more like Mars than planet Earth. The spectacularly stark scenery is certainly to die for – literally, if you don’t take enough water with you! Thankfully, vehicles have storage space for ample supplies of refreshments.

Dust, the colour of saffron and peaches, billowed from our wheels and caked our faces as we drove. Moving slowly past outside were beautiful mountains, strangely-shaped kopjes, golden fields of grass and gravel plains dotted with weird welwitschia plants, which looked more like burnt-out tyres than prehistoric vegetation.

“These ancient plants can survive their whole life without rain,” said my guidebook. It went on to add that they “can live to excess of 2500 years merely by absorbing moisture from the air.” Incredible indeed, considering there is little if any nourishment floating in the breezes blowing across the plains.

It was certainly a fine family adventure, and it seemed as if all the scenery and the animals we sighted – ostrich, desert elephant, leopard, lion, hyena, black rhino – existed solely for our pleasure. Tourists, buildings and traffic were all but non-existent as we cruised through the nation’s open countryside. When not snoozing like a typical one-year-old, Sam squinted out at the vastness passing him by.

Our slaphazard itinerary took us all over the place, from Brandberg Mountain (a rock behemoth jutting out from the desert where rock art resides) through to the Torra Conservancy, where desert black rhino and elephant frequent.

We also ate up many a mile in the great Namib Desert, the serene wasteland which skirts the western seaboard. Rain rarely falls here, and life could not exist at all if it were not for the regular moisture-laden fogs that roll in from the Atlantic. Someone once told me that there are middle-aged bushmen living in this area who can recall seeing rain only once in their lives.
 

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Surprisingly though, it was cold throughout most of our days. So chilly in fact that Sam’s little bum quickly developed goose bumps when I changed his nappy on the hood of the 4WD. By the time I’d finished we were both covered in a chilly sheen of sparkling dew. Shivering like a chihuahua wasn’t something I’d expected from a desert known for being drier than British humour and hotter than celebrity gossip. It was hard to imagine temperatures rising over 50 degrees Celsius, something that happens regularly during certain times of the year.

Despite the chill though, which I suspect was easier to cope with than the heat would have been, we had a thoroughly good time investigating the desert’s more delicate details. One of our favourite finds amongst the rolling dunes and dry riverbeds were the little beetles who scurried energetically amid miniature forests of oddly shaped plants while dodging fleet-footed lizards.

There were also odd little plants that looked like purple gherkins. Other things growing forth from the sands resembled tiny orange buttocks, reddish cucumbers and bright green grape-like things. Viewed from up close, the diminutive succulent flora of Namibia looks more like a coral reef than a terrestrial desert habitat.

Forays down to the coast were a regular undertaking, and there we met up with some of the region’s larger inhabitants: Cape fur seals. Clustered along the coast in their thousands, they frolicked amongst the remains that gave the Skeleton Coast its name. Patrolling the peripheries of these smelly colonies, undoubtedly looking for the young, weak or old, were brown hyenas and jackals.

When the seals and their accompanying characters were out of the picture, the Atlantic shore was truly a desolate place. Littered with bleached whale skeletons and rusting shipwrecks, it told a story like few other graveyards could.

Life and death have never been shown on such an epic stage as Namibia – it’s as beautiful as it is harsh. Journeys here are always rewarding, though doing it yourself in a hired vehicle certainly adds another enjoyable dimension. You don’t have to be Indiana Jones to accomplish it, but you’ll certainly feel just like him if you do.