Heritage & Culture

Namibia’s highest mountain holds one of the densest bodies of rock art in the world, and its most famous figure was misnamed twice.

Get the words for the country, the people and the language right, and Botswana will notice; get them wrong and it will notice that too.

Botswana was never colonized in the way its neighbors were, and the story it offers a returning visitor is about what happened after independence.

Botswana eats meat and grain, in that order, and its national dish is a method rather than a recipe: boiled slowly, then pounded.

Four thousand five hundred paintings in ten square kilometers of Kalahari, and the people who live beside them still treat it as a place of worship.

A river that never reaches the sea, flooding a desert in the middle of the dry season, is the whole reason the Okavango exists.

Botswana calls the Makgadikgadi the largest salt pans in the world, and its nomination is for the archaeology as much as the emptiness.

Zambia runs on greeting people properly, and a visitor who learns that one habit will be treated differently for the rest of the trip.

Zambia is not a place to look for a ship that left, and the reconnection it offers is a different and less familiar one.

Nshima is not a side dish in Zambia, it is the meal, and everything else on the plate is named for its relationship to it.

Zambia has exactly one World Heritage property and it is shared with Zimbabwe, which shapes what you see and where you have to stand.

The oldest known wooden structure in the world was found in Zambia, at a waterfall almost no itinerary has ever heard of.