Out on the M1 wasteland, I’m buoyed by the sight of a police barricade. But sadly the cop doesn’t want to chat. Out here, I think, a high-speed chase ends only when the petrol runs out. And our imaginary thrill almost comes to an embarrassing halt. Somewhere near Okahandja, an old western film set of town, a halfway house of copper mines and thick sausage rolls, we flash by the last gas station for 200 miles, and decide to press on for sunset by the sea.

Three hours later we’ve passed few signs of civilization, which calms and frightens in equal measures, and I find myself thinking, is Namibia closed today? The odd abandoned tin shack, the crimson flicker of a faraway tree, the odd telecommunication billboard, the teleport to another sci-fi film set paradise. (Aside from the cult classic The Gods Must be Crazy, Namibia’s film industry reached its peak as a setting for 1970s European porno.)

Still on the M1 wasteland, the Toyota Camry is an efficient beast. Yet the sweats increase as the African sun sets cold on your face, and the wind picks up gravel, and a sandstorm looks just like your sea. Nobody wants to be here, now, and I can feel it white-knuckled on the wheel. Adventure travel just got personal, but as I think about carving up my body as rations for my friends to eat, we putt-putt into Swakopmund and drink our nerves dry from the tap.

Bavaria Gone Wild

Swakopmund is like a German version of Futurama. It’s a science fiction fairytale filled with carnival air and outpost looseness. Among delicious art deco buildings, a dangerous Camus-like boredom hangs in the air, alongside heavy beers and cakes, tourist-lined galleries and craft shops, torrential ocean swells, sprawling residential developments, invisible poverty and empty-shelved supermarkets.

Swakopmund has reinvented itself as an adventure capital, a place to jump out of planes and drink the adrenaline all night long. It’s Bavaria in the year 4000, an apocalyptic vision of global warming and universal suntans. We rent quad bikes at the place where Brangelina rented quad bikes and this Dutch-speaking dude takes us up into the mountains on an ‘eco-friendly’ machine that spews that hard-to-find gasoline over a prehistoric symbiotic wonderland, but the views at the top of the sand running to the sea make you shut up your green face and gasp.

The wide streets feel like a Southern Californian beach town in the 1950s, but then you turn the corner and the road hits the horizon, and it’s more like Mad Max in the making. We spend the night in a ship by the sea, fitted with wall-length mirrors, jacuzzis and a cold meat breakfast. It feels like an outback swingers party, but we were far too tired to play.

The next morning we strayed north from the highway and lost a day to the dustbowl. In the hard-faced noontime sun, a derelict German pig farmer sold us broken chunks of quartz on a dead-end track. I bought a pile from the toothless angel, and followed his directions to Spitzkoppe, a giant sandcastle carved out of thick air. After Uis, we found the White Lady, the oldest rock painting on Earth. We played it safe with the sunset and stopped, half-tanked, on the edge of Etosha.

Etosha National Park

The great saltpan of Etosha National Park is reason enough to visit Namibia. Like all game viewing, it’s best to get there first thing in the morning, but we rolled in at beer o’clock and found two lions licking up a pond. Their shadows fell in single file and the zebras and the impalas and the wildebeests stood up, hair-tight on their backs, while we ate crisps and blew the air-con and waited for someone to kill. We didn’t have to wait for long.