The journey begins at Walvis Bay, on the Namibian coast, where the desert runs straight into the cold Atlantic. The town sits on a large natural lagoon that is one of the most important wetlands on the African coast, alive with flamingos, pelicans, and the marine life supported by the nutrient-rich Benguela current. Check in mid-morning, and the train departs around eleven, turning inland and east across the Namib.

There is time to settle into your suite and find the lounge and observation cars over lunch. For the first stretch the observation car runs at the front of the train, a small touch that gives a clear view down the line and is a favourite with the rail enthusiasts on board. The Namib is reckoned to be one of the oldest deserts on earth, a vast run of gravel plains, dune fields, and scattered mountains stretching down the coast through Namibia from southern Angola, and the afternoon is spent watching it roll past.

Tea is served in the afternoon, and dinner tonight is formal, as the evenings are on Rovos; the kitchen is genuinely good, so it is worth leaning into rather than dressing down. By the time you turn in, the train is well inland, heading north toward Otjiwarongo and the cheetah country, with the first excursion in the morning.

A relaxed start, then an afternoon visit to a cheetah conservation project near Otjiwarongo, in the cattle country of north-central Namibia. The Cheetah Conservation Fund was founded in Namibia in 1990 and has become the leading centre in the world for cheetah research and conservation. Namibia holds the largest wild cheetah population anywhere, and most of it lives on farmland rather than in parks, which puts the cats in direct conflict with livestock farmers.

The visit explains how the fund works on that problem, through research, rehabilitation, education, and the well-known programme that places guard dogs with farmers so they no longer need to shoot cheetah to protect their herds. You see the animals at close range and come away with a clear sense of how the species is faring across its range. It is a working conservation project rather than a roadside stop, and it gives the day real substance.

Back on board, the rest of the day is spent on the train as it continues north toward Tsumeb through open bushveld dotted with the large communal nests of sociable weavers. Tea is served in the observation car, now back at the rear, and dinner is formal as the journey continues. By the time you turn in, the train is near the edge of Etosha, with two nights of game viewing and a lodge ahead.

After breakfast you pack a small overnight bag for the two nights at Etosha, with your main luggage staying on the train, then transfer about an hour to a lodge on the edge of the park. Etosha is one of the great wildlife areas of southern Africa, covering more than twenty-two thousand square kilometres around the Etosha Pan, a salt flat so large it can be seen from space. The name means the Great White Place, after the pale, cracked surface of the pan.

You check in and have lunch, with time to settle in, then head out on an afternoon game drive of around three hours. Etosha works differently from the green parks of the east: in the dry months the animals are drawn to a string of waterholes, so rather than searching the bush you often sit and let the wildlife come to the water. Elephant, lion, springbok, gemsbok, zebra, and giraffe are all common, and Etosha is one of the better places to see black rhino. The birdlife is excellent too, with flamingos gathering on the pan when the rains fill it.

Dinner and the overnight are at the lodge. After the first night on the train, a night in a room that does not move, with the sounds of the bush outside, is a welcome change, and the two-night stay means there is no rush, with a full morning in the park still to come.

An early game drive at first light, the best time of day in Etosha. In the cool hours the predators are still moving after the night and the grazers gather at the waterholes, so the morning often produces the strongest sightings of the stay: lion, elephant, and again the chance of black rhino, with the low sun throwing long light across the pan. The stillness of dawn in the park, before the heat builds, is the kind of thing the trip is built around.

You return to the lodge for a relaxed breakfast, a chance to compare notes on what the morning turned up, then check out and transfer back to the train at Tsumeb, about an hour away.

Lunch is served as the train departs Tsumeb for Kranzberg, and the afternoon is spent on board as the country rolls by, the bushveld giving way gradually to the drier, more open country of central Namibia. Tea is served in the observation car, and dinner is formal as the journey continues. After two nights off the train, settling back into your suite feels like coming home, and the evening passes at the easy pace the journey has by now established, with the dunes of Sossusvlei the next day’s destination.

Breakfast is served as the train runs on toward Windhoek, and then in mid-morning you leave the train again, with a small overnight bag, for the second off-train stay. A light aircraft makes the roughly one-hour flight west to a lodge near Sossusvlei. The flight is part of the experience, the land below shifting from scrubby basin to gravel plain to the great sea of red dunes that defines this part of the Namib.

After checking in there is lunch and time at the lodge, with the dunes as a backdrop. In the late afternoon a guided drive takes you out into the dune field. The sand here is over five million years old and red from its iron-oxide content, and because the wind blows from several directions the dunes build into the multi-armed star shapes the area is known for. The colour shifts through the day, deepening toward sunset, and the guide explains how plants and animals make a living in a place this dry.

As the light goes, dinner is served out under the open sky, away from the train and away from any other light. After the close, social world of the carriages, the silence and the scale of the desert at night make this one of the quieter highlights of the trip. You stay the night at the lodge, the dunes dark against the stars.

A five o’clock wake-up with tea and coffee, then a sunrise drive into Sossusvlei with breakfast laid out in the vlei. This is the view the desert is famous for: a white clay pan studded with the blackened skeletons of camelthorn trees that died centuries ago, ringed by some of the highest dunes in the world, the whole scene turning from grey to gold as the sun comes up. Early light is when the dunes look their best, before the heat and haze build.

After breakfast you return to the lodge, check out, and fly about an hour to Windhoek, Namibia’s capital. Lunch is at the Windhoek Country Club, followed by a city tour. Windhoek sits in the central highlands, ringed by the Auas and Eros mountains, and is small, tidy, and walkable, with a strong German thread running through it. The tour takes in the TransNamib Transport Museum in the old station, which sits well with the journey you are on, the Independence Memorial Museum, the 1907 Lutheran Christuskirche, and the Namibia Craft Centre in the old Breweries building.

In the early evening you rejoin the train and it pulls out south toward Mariental, into the Kalahari country. After two nights of desert lodges and light aircraft, settling back into your suite feels like coming home, and dinner is formal as Namibia’s southern plateau slips by in the dark.

A relaxed morning on board as the train runs south through the Kalahari country of southern Namibia, red sand and open scrub under big skies. Breakfast and an early lunch are served as the country rolls past.

In the afternoon there is a visit to Keetmanshoop and the quiver tree forest at Garas Park. The site holds roughly three hundred quiver trees, the strange branching aloe now classified as Aloidendron dichotomum, formerly Aloe dichotoma. The San once hollowed out the soft, fibrous branches to make quivers for their arrows, which is how the tree got its name. They are slow-growing and long-lived, and their silhouettes against the desert sky are what bring people here, especially in the late light.

This is the southern Namibian desert at its starkest: dolerite boulders, sparse scrub, and these odd, sculptural trees standing among the rocks. The guide explains how the quiver tree stores water and sheds branches to survive the heat, part of the wider story of how life adapts to a place with almost no rain. Tea is served as the train departs for Aus, and dinner is formal as the journey continues toward the diamond coast and the following morning’s excursion.

An early breakfast, then a transfer of about an hour to Lüderitz and the diamond ghost town of Kolmanskop. After diamonds were found lying in the sand here in 1908, a German mining town sprang up in the desert, complete with a grand hall, a hospital, and the first X-ray machine in the southern hemisphere. When the diamonds ran out the town was abandoned, and the dunes have been moving back in ever since. Walking through rooms half-filled with sand, doors opening onto drifts, is the reason photographers come from all over the world.

From there you continue into Lüderitz, a German colonial port on a wild, windswept bay, its Art Nouveau buildings and the hilltop Felsenkirche standing against the rock and the cold Atlantic. The coast around it is rich with wildlife: seals, penguins, flamingos, and seabirds, and out on the plains near Garub the feral horses of the Namib, descended from stock left behind generations ago and now living wild in the desert. Lunch is taken in Lüderitz, with time to take in the town and the sea air.

You return to the train, which departs for Holoog with the observation car leading the way until after dinner. Tonight’s dinner carries an African theme rather than the usual formal dress, a small bit of fun, as the diamond coast slips behind you and the train heads for the canyon.

An early breakfast, then a transfer of about an hour to Fish River Canyon, one of the great landforms of southern Africa. It is the largest canyon in the southern hemisphere and second in size only to the Grand Canyon: around a hundred and sixty kilometres long, up to twenty-seven kilometres wide, and close to five hundred and fifty metres deep.

It was cut over many millions of years by the Fish River, Namibia’s longest interior river, which rises in the central highlands and flows south to join the Orange on the South African border, and it sits within the Ai-Ais Richtersveld Transfrontier Park. You walk the viewpoints along the rim, where the canyon drops away in stepped cliffs and the river winds far below on the floor. The guide fills in the geology and the way plants and animals survive in such a dry, exposed place. It is a vast, quiet landscape, and the scale of it takes a moment to register.

Back on the train for lunch, the journey continues toward the border. Tea is served in the observation car as the train completes border formalities and crosses into South Africa. Dinner is formal as the train heads on toward Upington, and by the time you turn in you are in a new country, the desert giving way to the green ribbon of the Orange River valley.

The train comes into Upington, on the banks of the Orange River, the first stop in South Africa. The contrast is sharp: after the Namibian desert, the river brings a green ribbon of vineyards, raisin farms, and irrigated fields through otherwise hard country.

The morning ashore is the highlight: a walking tour of the town, followed by a cruise on the Orange itself. The Orange is the longest river in South Africa, rising in the Lesotho Drakensberg and running west to the Atlantic, and it forms part of the borders between South Africa and Lesotho, and between South Africa and Namibia. Drifting on the water with the green banks on either side and the dry country beyond is a quiet, pleasant way to spend the morning, and a change of pace from the train.

You return to the train around midday, and it sets off across the Karoo, the vast semi-desert that was once an inland sea; over millions of years its sediments were laid down and worn into the flat-topped hills and open plains you see now. Lunch and tea are served as the country rolls past, and dinner is formal as the train heads toward Kimberley, the observation car leading the way until morning. By the time you turn in, the train is crossing the Karoo toward the diamond fields.

The train reaches Kimberley in the morning, the town that diamonds built. The morning is spent at the Big Hole and the adjoining Diamond Mine Museum. Diamonds were found here in 1871, setting off one of the great rushes of the nineteenth century, and the Big Hole is the largest hand-dug excavation in the world, a vast crater now part-filled with water, with the underground workings running far deeper still. The fortunes made here founded De Beers and shaped the whole region for a century.

The museum recreates the rush-era town, with restored buildings, a transport hall, and a diamond display, and it makes a strong, human stop, the story of the people and the money behind the stones, before the last leg of the journey.

You return to the train for lunch as it begins the climb northeast toward Pretoria, up onto the Highveld. Tea is served in the observation car, and tonight’s dinner carries a 1920s theme rather than the usual formal dress, a final bit of fun on the last night on board. After eleven nights crossing two countries, from the Atlantic to the Highveld, the evening has a relaxed, valedictory feel, the long table of fellow travellers now familiar, with the capital and journey’s end ahead in the morning.

A final, unhurried breakfast as the train makes its way across the goldfields of the Witwatersrand, the gold-bearing reef that built Johannesburg and modern South Africa, on the last run into the capital. After the deserts and canyons of Namibia and the long crossing of the Karoo, the green, built-up country of the Highveld marks the end of the journey.

A last lunch is served on board, and the train comes into Rovos Rail’s private station in Pretoria in the late afternoon, where the journey ends. Pretoria is one of South Africa’s three capitals, set in the warmer Bushveld north of Johannesburg and known for the jacarandas that line its streets in spring, and it is the home base for the Rovos journeys.

From here you continue to your onward arrangements. Pretoria and neighbouring Johannesburg sit at the heart of Gauteng, with the country’s main international airport between them, so the run makes an easy end to a trip or a starting point for onward travel, whether north to the Kruger and the Lowveld, on to Cape Town or Victoria Falls by rail, or further afield. After two countries crossed from the Atlantic coast, the Highveld is a practical and central place to finish.