Most people who visit Africa usually go on a safari. And there's nothing else on the planet like it: driving through the flat grasslands of thorny acacia trees, telling your fellow travelers to hush when you think you see something, and then whipping out your camera and holding your breath as a several-ton elephant lumbers out of the trees. It's the stuff of legends.

But there is a high price to be paid.

Excluding the cost of actually getting to and from the African country in which you want to safari, and then finding transport, food, and accommodation, even just the safari itself may cost you upwards of $1,000. Per person, per day, of course.

But there's a cheaper way: you can rent a car and do a self-drive tour through a place famous for its abundance of African wildlife: Etosha National Park in Namibia. You'll have control over everything, when you eat, where you go, how long you want to stay taking pictures of giraffes, and where you'll stay the night, all for a fraction of the cost.

4x4 Vehicle Rental (with rooftop tent): ~$100-$120 per day
Entrance to Etosha Park: $5.50 per person, per day
Camping within the park: $23 per person
Camping outside of the park: ~$15 per person

Because our motorcycle was broken in Namibia and we had to wait for a part to arrive, we decided to rent a car and explore by 4WD in the meantime. This turned out not to be as damaging to our schedule as we thought, because most of Namibia's sites are not accessible by motorcycle, including Etosha National Park. So having a 4x4 vehicle is really the way to go.

Windhoek is the capital city of Namibia, and is more or less in the middle of the country. That makes it fairly close to everything, and only a five-hour drive away from Etosha. So if you wanted to fly in, see the elephants for a couple days, and fly out, this could even be done in four days.

We rented our car for nine days, and this was enough time to see pretty much everything we wanted to see in the whole country, including the stunning red dunes of Sossuvlei, some beautiful mountain passes, fur seals on the skeleton coast, a visit to a Himba village, and three days in Etosha. Click here to see our itinerary.

If you have the time, three days in Etosha should be enough to have all your National Geographic dreams come true. And if you're lucky and see all your checklist animals on the first day, then you can use those extra days to relax by the pool, sleep in, or simply drive around to see it all again.

But in the end, what you see on a safari is about luck. And if you don't see anything but giraffes and springbok on the first two days, then you might want to dish out the money for a game drive on the last. This will increase your chances of seeing wildlife because the drivers are in constant communication with each other throughout the park as to where the local lion prides are, for example. So it's pretty much a guarantee to see elephants and lions.

Make sure you rent your car from a reputable agency (we didn't, and were stressing out the whole time about whether we'd get our deposit back). Namibian roads are very corrugated, and are known to eat up tires, so make sure you have at least one full-sized spare with you and a policy that covers a flat. Many rental agencies will provide you with two spares, and also look into coverage for chips in the windshield and other dents from rocks being flown at you.

Most 4x4 rentals in Namibia will give you the option of having a rooftop tent. If you like to camp, this is definitely the cheapest (and in my opinion, most fun) way to go. Just make sure you zip up all of the netting since Etosha is in the malaria zone. Don't risk trading a cool breeze for a disease that may mess you up for a lot longer than an uncomfortably hot night.

The thing about Etosha National Park which makes it so great for seeing wildlife is that unlike the Serengeti in Tanzania and Kenya, Kruger in South Africa, or the Okavango Delta in Botswana, Etosha is in a desert. That means that all the animals from the park must get their water needs at a watering hole, and lucky for us, they've built roads that lead directly to them. It's like driving up to The Lion King version of an outdoor theater at which you know the actors must show up.

The National Park opens from sunrise to sunset, and the only way to stay longer is to stay within the park at one of their campgrounds or lodges. Though it's more expensive than staying outside, this is recommended because they have floodlit waterholes there which certain more nocturnal animals frequent, such as rhinos and leopards.

The park is broken up into two sections: the east that runs along the Etosha mud pan and has the most wildlife action, and the west which is more desolate, but also more intimate with less tour buses. You can find plenty of animals there too, but in general it's not as concentrated.

From Windhoek, you will most likely enter Etosha at Anderson Gate leading to Okaukuejo, which is right in the middle of the park on its southern edge. At the gate you'll fill out some paperwork, then pay once you get to Okaukuejo camp, which is 15 minutes up a paved road (one of the only paved roads). I suggest you stock up on food and snacks from outside the park, because even though there are restaurants and stores within, they are expensive and sorely lacking.

There are two other main camps on the eastern side: Halali, which is where you should stay if you want to see rhinos at night, and Namutoni on the eastern edge, which is atmospheric with its thatched huts. All three camps have petrol and supplies. A good plan of action would be to start early in the morning at Okaukuejo, and to try to stop at as many watering holes as you can on your way to Halali for a lunch break. Then you can continue going east and end up by Namutoni, or a campground outside of there for the night. The next day, do it all in reverse.

​Having a map of the park is important, along with downloading offline Google maps of the area since many of the concrete “signs" in the park are worn away. And don't forget to pull over and talk to other safari-goers while at the watering holes. You might get some inside scoops on where the lions have been keeping their cubs, and where the elephant herds were last headed.

Because it's a desert, you won't find water-loving animals such as hippos, water buffalo, and crocodiles at Etosha.

What you will see are antelope, zebras, giraffes, wildebeest, ostriches, warthogs, plus four of the “big five": elephants, lions, leopards, and rhino (no water buffalo).

​To get a better idea of what you're looking at, here's a list starting at the bottom of the food chain:

Rhinos: Etosha is famous for having many rhinos, both black and white varieties (you can tell the difference by their nose shape, not color). They are somewhat elusive, and we didn't see any, though we met lots of people who did. Either you're lucky and one crosses the road in front of you, or the best way to see them is to stay at a camp at the park overnight and sit by the watering hole. Rhinos love to socialize around the watering hole at night, and rumor is the camp at Halali may offer your best chances of seeing them.

There are also leopards and cheetahs at Etosha, but it's very rare to see them. To increase your chances, stay in the park overnight and watch the watering holes since leopards are mostly nocturnal. For cheetahs, I think you just have to be lucky.

But you have a pretty good chance of seeing lions. We stayed three days, and after the first, we lost count of how many lions we'd seen. And once you figure out where they are on the first day, you can return to those same spots on the second and third day. Plus, the lions at Etosha are pretty used to big vehicles always around them, and they'll often just be hanging out right on the side of the road. It's very scary and surreal to be face to face with one staring right at you just meters away.

When I was dreaming about going on a safari, mostly I just wanted to check off animals from my mental checklist, and take pictures of them to post on social media. But what surprised me was that once I got out there, I found the experience to be much deeper and more profound than that.

Because the wildlife at Etosha are all so concentrated together, we were immersed in both the beauty of life and the horror of death. And I realized that I felt passionately for both sides of the “war". I watched the little springboks cautiously take a drink, looking out for predators, and I admired the way they jumped and frolicked like innocent fawns from Fantasia.

But then when I saw the lions with their adorable fuzzy cubs, I couldn't help but want to root for them also to get enough food to feed their young. It was like living inside a BBC David Attenborough nature documentary, and it was a real learning experience for me, showing me that within nature, good and evil are only a matter of perspective.

Safaris are perfect for all ages (except maybe babies). But if you have children, then what better way to spend your vacation time with them? Come to Namibia, and I promise your kids' eyes will widen with wonder and delight (and your eyes will too).

All in all, I feel deeply satisfied with my African safari, and the fact that I didn't break the bank to do it, is even better.

Next, Tim and I get back on our bike and head to Botswana! So stay tuned!

This week we'd like to thank Freida and Francis for being such wonderful hosts in Windhoek, Duard and Ruan for all your help with the bike, and Matt Wilks and Curt Ownby for supplying the stickers and photos we have for sale. Check them out!

We were on our way to Namibia's famous red dunes at Sossusvlei when we took a nasty spill and broke our motorcycle's monoshock (rear suspension), which if you're unfamiliar with bike mechanics, is something that you can't just fix on the side of the road. So we had to tow our bike up to Namibia's capital city of Windhoek (which was quite an adventure in itself) and are still waiting for a new monoshock to be flown in from Austria.

While we're waiting, we decided to rent a car here in Namibia to explore this beautiful country. ​And what a trip it's been!

It turns out that going by 4x4 is the way to see Namibia since most of the country's sights prohibit motorcycles to enter. This is due to a number of reasons (such as lions could chase you, a valid reason I suppose), so in order to see things, we would have had to either join a tour group or rent a car anyway. Even the place we were headed to when we had our accident, Sossusvlei, doesn't allow motorcycles in, it turns out. Maybe this broken monoshock was a blessing in disguise.

We started in the capital city of Windhoek (said like VIND-hook, it's a German word since Namibia used to be a German colony), and our first destination was to conquer those wretched sand dunes that we had wanted to see when we first broke down: Sossusvlei.

The name means “Dead-End Marsh", and if you look at an aerial image of Sossusvlei, you can see why. All along Namibia's Atlantic coast is an expanse of red sand dunes, and that is the Namib Desert. But then there is an area cutting into it where an ancient river once tried to push its way through the sand. That's Sossusvlei, and sometimes when it does rain, water still flows through that corridor, only to peter out at the end in a marshy pan of soaked sand. When it's not raining (most of the time as you can imagine), this area is a perfect peninsula of hard land sticking into the sea of sand, so you can drive into it and get up-close to the impressive dunes.

And when I say impressive dunes, I mean some of the largest sand dunes on earth. Not only is the Namib desert the world's oldest desert, and the red rusty color of the sand makes for incredible pictures, but because of the cross-winds keeping the dunes stable, the sand takes on gorgeous shapes as it piles up to towering heights. Big Daddy is the name of the largest dune of Sossusvlei, and at 325 meters high (that's 1,066 feet!), climbing up this dune takes many strenuous hours.

That was not something that really appealed to us, but we did climb a much smaller, yet still big sand dune with a much more boring name: Dune 40.

The key is to get to the dunes early, right at sunrise when the sand is fiery red in the slanted sunlight but icy cool to the touch (by 10:00 AM it's scorching, so hot you can't climb the dune without wearing boots). While we climbed, one side of Dune 40 looked glittering and velvety smooth in the sun, while the other side was still obscured in shadow. After only about a half hour of trudging, we reached the top, and at the crest of it there was this perfect sweeping line where the bright desert sun met the darkness of night. It was stunning, and well worth the effort of getting up there.

A Sea of Sand is the perfect description for the Namib desert, and you would think there'd be nothing else out here, but amazingly, we saw quite a bit of life amidst the dunes. Little lizards, beetles, and all types of birds had made their way to Sossusvlei, but what was most surprising was to see giant Oryx antelope hanging out. They're gorgeous: with two huge straight horns coming out of their skulls in a massive V, ridged to mark their age like the rings of a tree, and black and white paint on their faces like they're going out for the Day of the Dead. What they ate out there, I have no idea, but the Oryx (Gemsbok in Afrikaans) are particularly adapted to life in the desert, and in fact, they prefer it.

After all the dust and dryness of Sossusvlei, we headed to the Atlantic coast to freshen up with some cool ocean breezes.

We had rented a car from a local taxi company in Windhoek instead of a name brand rental agency because it was a good deal, but we definitely got what we paid for. The air conditioning was broken and would only blow on our feet, so we had to constantly keep the windows open so that we didn't roast alive in there.

Blown out tires were strewn across the side of the road like it was a rubber graveyard. We passed several people with flats who were cranking their jacks and turning their lug wrenches. And we should have taken warning, because on one of those long desolate stretches, suddenly we could feel the car bottom out, and knew we had a flat.

But this is normal for Namibia, and simply a part of life out here. Everyone gets flats, that's just the way the roads are. All vehicles come with full spares, many with two, and most car rentals insure you up to two flats because they know it's bound to happen. Since we'd gone cheap, we told our rental/cab company that we'd pay for all damages, and ended up dishing out a bit of money for this flat. But in the end we were lucky to only have one. We met a guy who had rented a 4x4 and was on his fifth new tire.

At Walvis Bay, and all along the Namibian coast, the sand dunes meet the sea in a cloud of mist. You might think that sand and sea go together to make a perfect beach scene, and normally they do. But these massive Sahara-like sand dunes emptying into a frigid, almost antarctic Atlantic waters make for a very bizarre, foreboding scene. 

But then amidst all the desolation of the Skeleton Coast, suddenly we came to the Cape Cross Seal Reserve, and found ourselves immersed in a loud cacophony of wriggling creatures all chatting and arguing with each other, like a Venice Beach for seals.

Visiting this Brown Fur Seal colony was perhaps one of my favorite things I've done on my travels. It was just so jarring and fascinating. The intoxicating odor of them all (and I mean that in the worst way possible, because they stank like fish rotting in a decaying corpse), and their strange noises, like Wookies and children and grunting bears all together, it made me feel like I had walked into that bar in the original Star Wars and was suddenly surrounded by alien species.

Though it looked like some were trying to take a nap or quietly nurse their young, others were loudly complaining as they slopped their way around, pushing whoever was in their way, or completely walking over each other with flippers in faces. And still others were arguing, growling at each other and snapping like dogs.

The wooden walkways at Cape Cross didn't go into the seal colony as much as the seal colony had taken over the walkways. You could see that there had once been an attempt at building a roofed picnic area there, but the seals now completely owned that space and there was no taking it back. I was definitely in their world now, and was very thankful for the wooden bars that barely separated us, because some of those seals were absolutely huge with a mouth full of bloody fangs. Fish carcasses and strewn-apart entrails were everywhere, and you could see that sometimes the blood on their mouths was not just from having dinner, but from attacking each other.

After the seal colony, it took a few hours to get the putrid smell out of our noses as we headed inland, back to where the sun beat down on the rocks, and dust filled our car and clothes. That evening, as we camped in a town that hadn't seen rain in eight years (Uis), I realized that my hair smelled like it was burnt. Straw-like and crispy dry to the touch, both of us had hair that now appeared streaked in grey, though it was just dust and sand. Even a good shower didn't fix it.

Our final adventure in Namibia with our rental car was going to be Etosha National Park, a safari paradise of lions, elephants, rhinos, and giraffes. That will all be for my next blog post, part two of our rental car excursion, but on our way there, we had another Namibian surprise in store for us: the Himba.

The Himba people are an indigenous group of semi-nomadic Namibians who call the northern reaches their home. But what makes these people so iconic is the way the women cover their bodies with red ochre butter, and use this ochre mud to make long dreads in their hair. Decorated from head to toe in beads and hides, these bare-breasted women are a beautiful sight to behold.

Unfortunately, their traditional way of life is disappearing. For the past eight years Namibia has been in a severe drought, which has forced many of the Himba to give up grazing their traditional lands. Now you can see them oftentimes camped along the side of the road, as they use money from tourists and the bartering of goods to support themselves. So as we made our way from Uis to Etosha, we saw a tiny village of mud huts along the road and a little market of trinkets set up, and decided to stop and pay for a tour.

This was both fascinating and awkward. Our tour guide was a man from the village who spoke English (along with five other languages), and he took us around, showing us how the village was organized with a sacred fire in the central space, and how women dressed with cow or goat hide skirts and headdresses. We also got to see how the women used incense to “bathe", as they actually never take a bath, and simply reapply the ochre butter mixture on their skin every day, and then waft themselves with smoke.

The children were adorable, but I felt uneasy about being presented with women as if they were a circus attraction, and the fact that they rarely smiled or looked happy about us being there made it worse. Plus, paying to take pictures of half-naked women just seemed like something I never thought I would find myself doing.

They weren't all half-naked though. Some women dressed in what they called “Victorian" garb, which was their interpretation of the dresses European settlers had encouraged them to wear in the 1800's. But with very bright colors and really cool hats that were built to be supportive for carrying things on their heads, you could tell that they had taken the designs and made it their own.

We were just about done with our tour and feeling satisfied with our glimpse into this new and different culture when the guide asked us to do him a favor, (and no, it wasn't for dirt on Joe Biden). We had told him where we were headed and he said, “There's a woman here with a month-old baby, and she wants to go to the Himba village outside Etosha Park. Could you bring her there?"

We were shocked. Yes, we were going there, but that was three-and-a-half hours away, and this woman couldn't speak English, and she was covered in red mud and we were in a rental car, and she didn't have a shirt on... but hey, why not?

And so this became the authentic Himba experience that I was looking for. Despite having little to no English, this woman was full of smiles and her baby was adorable (with a very very long name that I could not remember), and she smelled like a mixture of incense and body odor. But truth be told, she probably smelled better than me at that moment. And with some blankets put over the seats so that she didn't get red everywhere, we had an enjoyable time listening to the Namibian CD that was left in the car by the taxi company, and waving to the other Himba people that we passed. I just felt bad that our air-conditioning didn't work and the car was super dusty, but she was probably very used to heat and dust.

When we arrived at Etosha, we dropped her off with her bags of ground corn flour and basket-weaving materials, and waved goodbye to our new friend.

In the end, as much as we love traveling on our motorcycle, going to Sossusvlei, the Cape Cross Seal Reserve, and transporting a Himba woman to another village all would not have been possible on our bike. So I was becoming very thankful for our rental car, and the best was still to come: our self-drive safari in Etosha National Park!

So stay tuned until next time!

Bonus news!

Tim is almost finished with his second book: Two-Up and Overloaded. It will cover our first year of travel from Chicago to Panama.

​If you haven't done so already, take a look at his first book Maiden Voyage to get to know the who, what, and why that inspired us to be on the trip we are currently on.

Once again we've broken down in the middle of nowhere, this time it was out in the scorching Kalahari desert after a nasty fall into the sand... But let me start at the beginning, and it was a good beginning: the Drakensberg, meaning Dragon Mountains in Afrikaans.

Back in South Africa, these jagged peaks definitely earned their name. Like towering stone monoliths ruling over the landscape from their lofty thrones, they say that it was the scenery of South Africa that inspired J. R. R. Tolkein to create Middle Earth in his fantasy books The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. And I certainly agree that there seemed to be magic there, like I could just picture a dragon hiding behind the crags, protecting his hoard of gold and treasure.