NOT ALL COUNTRIES' safaris are created equal. For herds so big they're hard to count, head to Kenya. If the wildebeest migration is your thing, try Tanzania. And Botswana is where you go for to the privilege of spotting game in isolation, followed by the pleasure of retiring to no-amenities-forgotten accommodation.

Then there's Namibia, which isn't overflowing with animals but still hosts reasonable populations of lions, leopards, elephants, rhinos, giraffes, cheetahs, and all manner of antelope. And while it may not be brimming with wildlife, Namibia isn't exactly stuffed with much of anything else either. There are fewer than 1.9 million Namibians—less than one-ninth the number of people living in greater Los Angeles—scattered across a piece of land roughly the size of California, Oregon, and Washington. In Namibia, desolation is exactly the point: Few places on the continent can compete with the country's immensity of open space; almost none have such a physically alluring landscape that's so completely untamed yet still relatively accessible. "It's Africa for beginners," said Stephan Bruckner, a polished 39-year-old Namibian entrepreneur and the managing director of the chic new Wolwedans Lodge, in the Namib Desert. "The country is clean, the infrastructure is in good shape, and everything works."

We have traveled to Africa to make a counterclockwise loop of Namibia in small-engine Cessnas. The trip would take at least a month if you rattled it out in a safari-ready 4x4;

In Namibia, desolation is exactly the point: Few places on the continent can compete with the country's immensity of open space; almost none have such a physically alluring landscape that's so completely untamed yet still relatively accessible.

we'll fly it in less than two weeks. After the Namib Desert, where waves of copper sand spill across the broad Gorrasis Farm valley and Wolwedans Lodge offers the ultimate in postcolonial indulgence, we'll trace the shoreline of the Skeleton Coast, a tumult of turgid swells and shifting shoals hung in thick ribbons of fog. Finally we'll fly to the Etosha Pan's lush swath of high-veldt grassland for the chance to see some of Africa's big game. According to the trip brief, however, wildlife is not the point of the voyage, and sightings are not guaranteed. After all, Namibian Encounters is not a safari in the big-game, East African sense of the word: There's no list of animals to tick off, no keeping score.

"'Safari,' in Swahili, means 'journey'; it has nothing to do with animals," notes author Paul Theroux at the outset of Dark Star Safari. "Someone 'on safari' is just away and unobtainable and out of touch." Etymology aside, people expect animals when they go to Africa. Which is part of why I signed on: Could a winged safari over a constantly shifting landscape where the game isn't necessarily the focal point really merit an eight-grand price tag?