Place to stay · Solitaire
Ababis Guestfarm
A family-run guest farm on the C14 at the foot of the Naukluft, just south of Solitaire, with eight rooms, a small campsite, farm hikes and gravel-road driver training.
Ababis is a working cattle farm with guest rooms on the C14 between Maltahöhe and Walvis Bay, just south of Solitaire, below the northern edge of the Naukluft mountains. It was founded in 1896 as an outpost of the old imperial stud at Nauchas, and the Schulze-Neuhoff family have run it since 1985. Sossusvlei and Sesriem Canyon are about 80 km away, so it works as a quieter base for the dunes.
What to expect
There are eight rooms for up to 21 guests. Two family rooms and two comfort rooms sit in the garden by the pool, and a honeymoon chalet and a self-catering house (five beds, two bathrooms, its own kitchen) are 100 to 200 metres away by the Tsondab River. The campsite has four pitches, each with a braai, sharing one shower and toilet block. Campers can book meals at the house.
Walking is the main draw. The farm has marked trails, including one up the Zipfelberg, and runs a guided three-day Naukluft hike for two to six people, best from April to October. Wildlife on the farm includes oryx, zebra, springbok, cheetah, bat-eared fox and hyena.
Practical details
- Phone: +264 63 293362. Postal address: PO Box 1004, Maltahöhe.
- Wi-Fi reaches most rooms. The family asks guests to leave devices away from shared meals.
Good to know
The farm has offered a gravel-road and off-road driving course since 2004, and Uwe Schulze-Neuhoff trained with ADAC Fahrsicherheit in Germany. It takes 4 to 5 hours and needs booking a month ahead. If you’re nervous about Namibian gravel in a hire car, it’s a sensible half day. Summer days reach 40°C and winter nights can drop to freezing.
Last updated 7 October 2026. Sources: Ababis Guestfarm, Ababis Guestfarm, rooms, Ababis Guestfarm, self catering and camping, Ababis Guestfarm, explore, Ababis Guestfarm, Naukluft mountain trail, Ababis Guestfarm, driver safety training, Ababis Guestfarm, about, Ababis Guestfarm, location and info.
A horse outpost older than Solitaire, and three cheetahs
Solitaire, the petrol stop everybody photographs, only dates from 1948. That year Willem van Coller bought 33,000 hectares of unfarmed government land known as Areb, and the record places Areb between Koireb to the north and Ababis to the south. So when the famous neighbour was still empty veld, Ababis had been a farm for 52 years.
Horses first, cattle later
It began with horses. In 1895 a government vet, Wilhelm Rickmann, set up a stud and horse depot at Nauchas, about 120 km south-west of Windhoek, on ground with good grazing that horse sickness had so far spared. Ababis was made an outpost of that stud the next year. Look at the dates. Hendrik Witbooi had held out in the Naukluft, the mountains right behind the farm, for more than a year after the German attack on Hornkranz in April 1893, and he only came to terms in September 1894.
By 1911 Nauchas was breeding mules too. How many animals ever stood at Ababis I can’t find. The farm’s own account jumps straight to the Voigt family, who kept it until 1985.
Three male cheetahs and a zebra
Since 2015 the Leibniz-IZW cheetah project from Berlin has worked this part of the Namib, and the farm’s own pages carry the research of its field man here, Ruben Portas. In May 2019 the team trapped two males from a coalition of three in the Namib-Naukluft park and put a GPS collar on one. On 23 September the collar stopped at a Hartmann’s mountain zebra carcass and stayed there for nineteen and a half hours. A tracking flight on 5 October found the collared cat dead less than 2 km away, with the other two lying within ten metres of it. The zebra tested positive for anthrax. The cheetahs tested negative, so the paper stops at calling anthrax the likely cause, and it thanks the Schulze-Neuhoffs by name for their help.
That story tells you the odds honestly. Cheetah are on the farm’s species list and they are really here, living on springbok, oryx and hares, with brown hyena and leopard as the competition. But the people who study them need collars, camera traps and an aeroplane to find them. Expect springbok and oryx on the plain and count a cat as luck. Portas sometimes takes guests out with him. It can’t be booked, because he keeps his own hours.
A river that gives up in the dunes
The Tsondab, which passes the chalets, sounds grander than it is. It rises in the Remhoogte mountains, runs about 150 km west into the park and never gets near the sea. It dries up at Tsondabvlei. It only flows after rain. One forum member who drove down in late January 2021 hit showers near Büllsport and had light rain at the farm that evening.
Two overlanders, thirteen years apart
Not many overlanders write about Ababis, and the two reports I found are one traveller’s word each. A camper in 2008 called it remote with good views and noted that campers could use the pool at the farmhouse. The 2021 visitor took the self-catering house and praised its kitchen, which came fully equipped.
Two cookbooks have come out of this farm. The second, by Kathrin Schulze-Neuhoff and Ria Henning-Lohmann, runs to 272 pages of recipes and portraits of friends and neighbours. The cooking leans on chard and pumpkin more than you’d expect on a cattle farm, and the meat that does reach the table is game from the farm itself. Drought has pushed the family to sell part of the cattle herd. And the base camp for the three-day mountain hike is an old abandoned farmhouse, which says enough about how hard this country is to farm.
