Remote access in Namibia

I'd wanted an adventure, not a mere holiday, and I found it in a 300km riding and camping expedition in Namibia. My 12-night trip included nine days of riding — some up to eight hours in the saddle — and spectacular views of the 161km-long, 27km-wide, Fish River Canyon.

The pace is often fast and riders must be experienced. The 10 riders on our trip met in Namibia's capital, Windhoek, and our guide and mentor, the indomitable Waldi Fritzsche, took us by minibus 600km into central southern Namibia, a seven-hour journey through semidesert, to meet the horses at our first camp, Springfontein.

Relaxing under the date palms we ate delicious mutton chops cooked on the camp fire with traditional boerewors sausage and stywe pap — mealy pap.

We were six Britons, one Austrian, one German and two Canadians. Most had owned horses and many had either eventing or hunting experience. Much of my own riding had been confined to Mottingham Farm Riding School in south-east London — 50 acres of fields sandwiched between a residential street and the busy A20 dual carriageway. How would I cope with some of the toughest riding country in the world? The answer was Leo, a 16 hands high seven-year-old chestnut gelding. All I had to do was stay on.

In the desert there is often no track.

The surface is rock or sand or scrub and the pace varies accordingly. Sometimes there were escarpments more suited to goats, but I trusted Leo — in the off-season these horses fend for themselves on the terrain and they learn quickly.

The camping was basic but there were bucket showers with hot water, and the often-sophisticated meals were cooked by the back-up crew on the fire. Most of us declined tents and slept on camp beds under the vast sky. After London's lightpollution it was a delight to watch the nightly circus of stars and planets.

At the canyon we passed what was once a massive waterfall crashing into a cavernous hole hundreds of metres below..

Now it is empty — rain is scarce and 80 per cent evaporates.

As we followed the zebra paths we saw a herd of hartebeest, then a lone demented ostrich racing hither and thither like a comic actor in a bedroom farce. Rounding a bend in a mountain pass we came upon grazing zebra oblivious of our presence.

At times we passed deserted homesteads with poignant names such as Luck and Hope, the semi-nomadic Afrikaner farmers long gone, their dilapidated clay brick homes testament to the struggle to survive. We were better prepared.

Our six-strong support crew were multi-skilled, and the lorry which met us at camp most nights carried water, firewood, high-protein horse feed and bales of alfalfa and hay.