The 24 Best Adventures in Africa

Sossusvlei is a salt and clay pan in the Namib-Naukluft National Park in Namibia, surrounded by massive red sand dunes — among the tallest in the world at over 300 metres.

The dead white camelthorn trees in the Deadvlei pan, set against deep orange sand and cobalt sky, have become one of Africa's most iconic landscapes.

A sea of orange dunes rising up to 150 metres at the edge of the Sahara, the most accessible major dune field in Morocco and the base for camel treks and overnight desert camps.

The dunes shift constantly with the wind, and sunrise and sunset turn the sand from deep gold to burnt red.

Nights in a Berber camp under an unpolluted sky are as much the draw as the dunes themselves.

A vast, shimmering salt pan visible from space anchors this national park, where waterholes along its edges concentrate wildlife in a way few other African parks match, especially in the dry season when animals converge to drink.

Self-drive visitors can park at floodlit waterholes after dark and watch elephants, rhinos and predators arrive, without needing a guide.

The pan itself is striking even without the wildlife around its rim.

The world's largest intact volcanic caldera holds an entire self-contained ecosystem within its walls, its crater floor packed with one of Africa's densest concentrations of wildlife, including the 'Big Five' all visible on a single day's game drive.

Unlike the Serengeti's open plains, animals here rarely migrate beyond the crater's rim, making sightings unusually reliable year-round.

Blyde River Canyon is one of the largest canyons in the world, the centrepiece of South Africa's Panorama Route, a red-rock gorge cut through the Mpumalanga escarpment.

Viewpoints along the rim look down on the Three Rondavels rock formations and the canyon's dammed river bend, while short walks lead to Bourke's Luck Potholes and God's Window.

It is a self-drive destination best covered over a full day of short stops rather than one overlook.

A surreal expanse of chalk-white rock formations near Farafra Oasis, carved by millennia of sand-wind erosion into shapes resembling mushrooms, camels, and icebergs scattered across pale desert sand.

Camping overnight among the formations, with no artificial light for miles, is the main way to see it - the white rock glows almost blue under a full moon.

It remains one of the least-visited major landscapes in Egypt outside the Nile corridor.

The second-largest canyon on Earth cuts a 160km gash through the Namibian desert, its layered rock walls dropping 550 metres to the seasonal Fish River below.

A multi-day hike along the canyon floor is one of Southern Africa's classic treks, but the main viewpoint at Hobas delivers the scale in a single sweeping look without any walking required.

Sunset turns the canyon's rust-red rock a deep orange.

Table Mountain's flat-topped summit, draped in its famous tablecloth of cloud, presides over Cape Town and offers 360-degree panoramas stretching from the Cape of Good Hope to the Winelands.

The mountain is home to an extraordinary number of endemic plant species found nowhere else on earth.

Africa's highest mountain stands alone on the Tanzanian plains, rising 5,895 metres above sea level as the world's tallest free-standing mountain.

Its snow-capped volcanic summit, increasingly threatened by climate change, can be reached by non-technical trekkers via several routes through dramatically changing ecosystems.

One of the hottest, lowest, and strangest inhabited places on Earth, a volcanic depression over 100 metres below sea level where sulphur springs bubble in acid-yellow and electric-green pools beside the active Erta Ale lava lake.

Camel caravans still cross the adjoining Danakil salt flats to mine slabs of salt by hand, much as they have for centuries.

The colours and scale look almost entirely artificial, which is exactly why people make the brutal trip.

Chapman's Peak Drive carves along sheer cliffs between Noordhoek and Hout Bay, the scenic centrepiece of a wider ride around the Cape Peninsula past Boulders Beach's penguins and the fynbos slopes near Cape Point.

The full loop, ridden each March by 35,000 cyclists in the Cape Town Cycle Tour, mixes ocean-cliff drama with quiet vineyard roads on the return leg.

Wind and open cliff edges make it a serious ride outside the closed-road race day.

At the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula, where the Gulf of Suez meets the Gulf of Aqaba, Ras Mohammed protects some of the Red Sea's most vivid coral reef, with underwater visibility regularly exceeding 20 meters and walls that drop dramatically into deep blue water just offshore.

The Shark and Yolanda Reef dive sites are considered among the best in the world for the sheer density and variety of reef fish.

The world's second-tallest waterfall drops in five free-falling stages down the Drakensberg escarpment, deep in the Royal Natal National Park.

Reaching the top requires a full-day hike including a stretch up two connected chain ladders bolted to the cliff face.

On a clear day after rain, the full 948-metre drop is visible from the valley floor without any hiking at all.

Named for the whale bones once littering its shore and the shipwrecks still rusting in its surf, this remote stretch of Atlantic coastline is where the Namib Desert's dunes meet a cold, fog-shrouded ocean in a landscape that feels genuinely otherworldly.

Seal colonies numbering in the thousands gather at Cape Cross, while the fog sustains desert-adapted wildlife found nowhere else, including elephants that wander dry riverbeds toward the coast.

A semi-arid expanse of red sand and scrubby grassland covering much of Botswana, home to the Central Kalahari Game Reserve's black-maned lions, meerkats, and San Bushmen communities with millennia-old tracking traditions.

It lacks the dune drama of the Sahara or Namib, but its vast, flat horizons and dark, unpolluted skies make for some of the best stargazing safaris in Africa.

Wildlife encounters here feel genuinely remote rather than staged.

Morocco's tallest waterfall drops around 110 meters in a series of cascades through red sandstone cliffs, with wild Barbary macaque monkeys often seen in the olive groves along the approach trail.

Paths wind down to the pool at the base, where small boats ferry visitors close enough to feel the spray, and mule owners offer rides back up for those who'd rather skip the climb.

Isolated deep in Egypt's Western Desert near the Libyan border, Siwa is a genuine oasis town of mudbrick ruins, freshwater springs and palm groves surrounded by dunes, significant enough that Alexander the Great made the arduous journey to consult its oracle temple.

The ruined hilltop fortress of Shali, built entirely from local salt-clay, dominates the town, while nearby salt lakes and hot and cold springs offer a stark contrast.

Compact compared to the Serengeti or Ngorongoro, Lake Manyara packs groundwater forest, acacia woodland, a soda lake and open grassland into a single park, known especially for tree-climbing lions and vast flamingo flocks along the alkaline shoreline.

The variety of habitat in a small area means a shorter game drive can still turn up a genuinely diverse range of wildlife.

Best known for enormous elephant herds — among the largest concentrations anywhere in Tanzania — Tarangire's landscape is dotted with iconic ancient baobab trees rising above golden grassland along the Tarangire River.

It draws far fewer visitors than the Serengeti-Ngorongoro circuit despite comparably strong wildlife density in the dry season, when animals converge on the river as other water sources dry up.

A laid-back diving town on the Gulf of Aqaba, Dahab trades Sharm el-Sheikh's resort scale for a mellow, backpacker-friendly waterfront lined with low-key restaurants right on the reef edge.

It's best known for the Blue Hole, a dramatic underwater sinkhole that's become one of the world's most famous — and most dangerous for unqualified divers — dive sites, alongside gentler reef diving and snorkeling directly off the shore in town.

A distinctly German-colonial coastal town where half-timbered buildings sit oddly against Atlantic surf and encroaching Namib dunes, Swakopmund has become Namibia's adventure-sports hub.

Sandboarding and quad-biking on the dunes at the town's edge, alongside skydiving and dolphin cruises, give it a livelier, more activity-driven scene than its quiet colonial streets suggest.

It's also the natural staging point for trips to the Skeleton Coast.

A chain-ladder ascent to the top of the Amphitheatre, a 5km basalt wall in the northern Drakensberg where the Tugela River tips over the escarpment as the world's second-highest waterfall.

The trail climbs steep gullies from Sentinel Car Park before two vertical chain ladders haul hikers onto the plateau, opening onto sweeping views over KwaZulu-Natal.

Weather turns fast near 3,000m, and the ladders close in lightning or ice.

Straddling the lush Zambezi and Kwando rivers in Namibia's Caprivi Strip, Bwabwata is a wetter, greener contrast to the desert scenery most visitors associate with Namibia, with elephant, buffalo, hippo and crocodile populations typical of Botswana or Zambia just across the border.

River cruises and game drives along the floodplains draw far fewer visitors than Etosha, giving it an off-the-beaten-path feel in a country already light on crowds.

Tanzania's second-highest peak is frequently climbed as acclimatization practice for Kilimanjaro, but stands as a serious, rewarding trek in its own right, with a technical scramble near the summit that Kilimanjaro's standard routes don't require.

The ascent passes through montane forest thick with colobus monkeys and buffalo before opening onto an ash cone and crater rim, with views across to Kilimanjaro on clear mornings.