Palmwag Tourism Concession

The lioness from Aub Canyon and a rhino called Teabag

In 1982 a botanical artist called Blythe Loutit went looking at plants on the inland edge of the Skeleton Coast in Monty, her old short-wheelbase Land Rover, with an Irish terrier called Eccles for company. She got a puncture and her jack was broken. The woman who got her going again was Ina Britz, a farm girl from Kamanjab, who showed her how to work a high-lift jack and had bad news. At a spring she had just come from lay three dead rhinos, shot up with an automatic weapon, the horns gone.

Damaraland was a restricted area then, which suited the people emptying it. The tribute the rhino journal Pachyderm printed when Loutit died names them: the South African army and government officials, shooting from the air and from trucks wherever there was water. Loutit and Britz roped in their husbands, a few businessmen in Windhoek and community leaders in Damaraland and set up the Namibia Wildlife Trust, which turned into Save the Rhino Trust. Britz died in August 1985, the year the first census found 56 rhinos.

A child’s letter and a rhino called Teabag

A lot of the early money came from schoolchildren selling rhino friendship patches. In the late 1980s one child wrote in to ask why, if horn is only fingernail, nobody just cut it off. The Department of Nature Conservation did exactly that, twice, in Damaraland.

By 1986 the trust had three tracking teams and ten game guards drawn from the communities. What they have built since is a file on every animal, with photographs, covering seven rhino generations by the time Loutit died in June 2005. Her British research director, Mike Hearn, had drowned surfing that January.

The file is why the rhinos here have names. In 2011 the trackers told a reporter from The Namibian that they knew 17 in the concession by name. Verity was 39 and pregnant, had a piece missing from one ear and used about 450 square kilometres. Diana calved at 40, lost the calf to a lion and died soon after. Another is Teabag, because the scout who first saw the animal had no paper and wrote his notes on the last teabag in his pack. That comes from Conrad Brain, who wrote in 2012 about rhinos caught around Palmwag being lifted out by Huey helicopter to restock old rhino country elsewhere in the north-west.

On Christmas Day 2012 a herdsman, Shaka Karutjaiva, found a cow near Mbakondja killed by a single bullet through the heart and lungs, her calf still alive beside the carcass. A man confessed within an hour of being confronted that day and showed the police where he had hidden the horns. The calf died on the way out.

The Queen was born here

By the end of 1990 every known lion on the Skeleton Coast, radio collars and all, had been shot or poisoned over livestock. In 1997 word got round that a few were hanging on in the hills around Palmwag. Philip Stander, known as Flip, went looking, and a year into his Kunene Lion Project 20 lions wore collars.

One was a cub born in the Aub Canyon in September 1998 and logged as Xpl-10. At 20 months she walked north with three young males, first to the Hoanib and then to the Hoarusib, more than 130 km away, and in August 2002 her cubs were found on the beach. Stander counted them the first lions on that coast in 12 or 13 years. She had 13 cubs in five litters and died in May 2014, aged 15. They called her the Queen.

Stander’s records show the Obab lionesses going down to the Uniab Delta in the Skeleton Coast Park and sometimes eating seals there. Animals that can cover 70 km in a day are not waiting at a waterhole for you.

On the night of 30 May 2025 a lioness called Charly, Xpl-114, killed a visitor, Bernd Kebbel, on the Hoanib at the top end of the concession. Stander’s report blamed years of crowding. Up to twelve vehicles at a time had sat far inside the 50 metre limit, and all 24 hunts she tried with more than four of them around were spoiled. She was lean, hungry and no longer wary of people.

Rhino from the camp, elephant from the lodge

Expert Africa publishes what its travellers have reported seeing since mid-2018, and when I checked in October 2026 the split was telling. From Desert Rhino Camp, deep inside, every one of them had seen black rhino and about four in ten had seen elephant. From Palmwag Lodge it was the other way round: roughly four in ten saw rhino and eight in ten saw elephant. The elephants follow the Uniab to the spring beside the lodge, most of all when the veld is dry. The lodge figure counts every guest, including those who never booked the tracking. Choose your base by the animal you want.

Tracking means an early start. The Namibian’s reporter left before dawn, drove for over an hour, picked up Verity at 100 metres and watched from about 50. The writer Roxanne Reid got to around 150 metres from a rhino feeding on a euphorbia among welwitschias. Expect long, dusty hours in an open vehicle either side of that.

Six hours for ninety kilometres

Sandra Windisch, who wrote in 2021 about driving in through the northernmost gate with her husband and two daughters of six and seven, called it the longest day of their trip: 90 km in six hours, the girls counting zebra and giraffe. They carried a satellite phone and knew that help, once called, could still be days off. That is one family’s account.

The rock under the wheels is lava that poured out between 136 and 132 million years ago, as Africa and South America came apart. Most of that lava field is now in South America.

The warden out here in 2014 was Chris Bakkes, a novelist who lost his left arm to two crocodiles in the Kruger and went about with a one-eyed Jack Russell called Tier. At the lodge bar, the tree alongside is full of noisy rosy-faced lovebirds, says a Tracks4Africa writer who stopped for lunch.