The African Explorer — Windhoek to Cape Town

Namibia has 2,687 kilometres of railway and no scheduled passenger train. TransNamib's StarLine services stopped in early 2021 and never came back; the Desert Express, the weekend train between Windhoek and Swakopmund that everybody remembers, stopped with them. On 2 April 2025 the operator put all three of its passenger trains — StarLine, the Desert Express and the Omugulugwombashe Star — out to tender for "the rehabilitation and operation of three tourist trains", which is about as plainly as a state railway ever admits that its coaches are standing still.

What does still cross the Namib is a charter. Two or three times a year the African Explorer — a rake of Rovos Rail sleeping cars, chartered and run as a tour by the Berlin operator Lernidee — is drawn out of Windhoek's small colonial station behind a pair of TransNamib diesels, worked north towards Etosha, west to the Atlantic at Swakopmund, then the whole length of the country to the South African border and on across the Karoo to Cape Town. Over 3,000 kilometres of that is on rails, eight of the nights are spent in a compartment, and at each stop the train is met by its own buses.

So this is not a train anyone catches. It is a train booked a year ahead for a fixed date, at a fixed price, with a doctor on board and a maximum of twenty-five guests to a guide — and for the moment it is the only way to ride a Namibian railway at all.

The train leaves from Windhoek, 1,600 metres up in the Khomas Highland, and it leaves slowly. The first afternoon is spent on the old main line north through private game farms, where giraffe, springbok and ostrich stand off from the fence and the schedule is loose enough to let people photograph them. There is almost no other traffic to get in the way: TransNamib is a freight railway with a thin timetable, and a charter can be given the road.

North to Etosha, then west to the sea

Guests leave the train for two nights around Etosha, driving in from the railhead and rejoining at Otjiwarongo. The train then runs back south and turns west onto the country's oldest alignment — Swakopmund to Windhoek, 383 kilometres, inaugurated on 19 June 1902 by the German colonial administration and still the spine of the network. It stops short of the coast, near Usakos, for the granite domes of the Spitzkoppe and the San rock art beneath them, and comes down into Swakopmund in the late afternoon: a German seaside town of gables and half-timbering with the Atlantic fog rolling over it.

The long run south

From the coast the pattern inverts. Guests go by road into the Namib for two nights at a desert lodge while the train repositions nearly 300 kilometres inland, and they rejoin it at Mariental. The last Namibian day is the emptiest: the train sets them down at Holoog, a halt with nothing at it, for the seventy-kilometre drive to the Fish River Canyon, then rolls south again and crosses into South Africa in the dark. Upington comes up next morning, then two days across the Karoo through Matjiesfontein and down into Cape Town.

There is no timetable to consult, because there is no scheduled service. The African Explorer runs as a chartered tour on fixed dates, in both directions, and every departure is sold as a package with its hotel and lodge nights, its excursions and its guides. Booking is compulsory and the train carries nobody who has not booked.

Windhoek to Cape Town runs in two lengths off the same train: 16 days including flights from Germany, and 14 days starting and ending on the ground in Africa. Both spend eight nights on board.

The same train works the reverse direction, Cape Town to Windhoek, on its own set of dates, and a second route runs from Pretoria to the Victoria Falls. A 2028 Windhoek departure, 10–25 November, is listed as a preview date rather than a bookable one.

Seasons are the two that suit the desert: late October into November, and February into March. Nothing runs in the southern winter.

The February window is also the wet one. Southern Namibia takes its rain in summer, and it can arrive hard: on 1 March 2026 a washaway took the last span of a bridge from under a private train near Naute, south of Keetmanshoop, and the line was closed while it was rebuilt. TransNamib appointed South Africa's Railway Safety Regulator to investigate and had the findings back by June. It is a reason to treat a February departure as weather-dependent, not a reason to avoid one.

Dates as of August 2026, from Lernidee Erlebnisreisen (opens in a new tab), which charters the train, and Discovery Trains (opens in a new tab) for the English-guided departures. Both confirm before travel; the October 2026 English departure was already waitlisted when this page was written.

Everything is in the fare: the compartment, all meals on board, the hotel and lodge nights off it, every excursion and entrance fee, the guides and the doctor. What sits outside it is the Namibian e-visa, tips, insurance, and — on the 14-day version — the international flights.

Two compartment grades are sold. The smaller is about 7 m², with a private shower and lavatory; the larger is about 10 m², with a small sitting area and a berth in the Deluxe cars. A third grade of three compartments, at about 6 m², exists on the German-guided departures. Prices below are per person sharing, from the two operators that sell this train.

No rail pass applies. Namibia has never been in the Eurail or Interrail systems, TransNamib sells nothing of the kind, and South Africa's Shosholoza Meyl network — which the train touches only in that it uses the same metals south of the border — has no pass either.

Nor would one help if it existed. The African Explorer is a private charter sold as a whole tour, and the rail movement is not separable from the lodge nights, the buses and the guides that come with it. The fare buys a fortnight, not a seat.

The nearest thing to a discount is the length of the trip: the 14-day version costs less than the 16-day one because it leaves out the flights from Germany, so anyone booking their own flights is buying the shorter package by default.

Almost everything the journey is taken for lies off the railway, and the train is honest about it: guests are set down at a station or a bare halt and driven to the thing itself, sometimes for a couple of hours and sometimes for two nights. The five below are the fixed points of the Namibian half, in the order the train reaches them.

Four of the fifteen nights are spent off the train, and the tour books them: a hotel in Windhoek, a lodge at the Etosha gate, two nights at a lodge in the Namib, and a hotel in Cape Town. The Etosha night is at Etosha King Nehale, forty chalets a kilometre from the park's King Nehale Gate, and the desert nights at Namib Desert Lodge.

The cards below are for the nights either side of the tour — arriving in Windhoek early, or staying on in Cape Town — plus the two lodges the train itself uses. One of them is a railway building: the Swakopmund Hotel occupies the town's old station, which is a reasonable place to break a journey the train only gives you an afternoon of.