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At Otjitotongwe Cheetah Park in northern Namibia, you get to meet the cats and give them a good scratch behind the ears. Usually this goes off without a hitch, but six-year old Zeeu has snagged a canine on my tatty t-shirt and now we’re both wondering how to extricate ourselves. To be fair, the situation is largely my fault. She’d started out licking a salty patch of skin on my shoulder, but that close to an armpit, I fear the gamey waft of unwashed journalist was too much for her and she went in for an investigative nibble.

We’ve straightened all that out though and Zeeu and I are best of friends, so I can get back to chatting with Tollie, patriarch of the Nel family whose farm is steadily turning into a home for Namibia’s dispossessed wild cheetahs.

“There are 7,500 cheetahs in Africa and 2,500 of them are here in Namibia. The trouble is they all live on farmland where they can be legally shot if they are a threat to livestock. Relocation doesn’t work, because the moment a cat is released it goes back to familiar hunting territory.”

These extraordinary cats and the people determined to save them are what brought me to Namibia, but my toothy encounter with Zeeu comes at the tail-end of an adventure which began nearly three weeks earlier, when I set out on a camping trip with Wild Dog Safaris.

Our group (ten punters plus a driver and guide) was barely two days out of Windhoek, the Namibian capital, when I discovered a couple of profound truths: a good bush shower is the best thing in the entire world; and the sound of lions at night is surprisingly reassuring. Even for an Africa first-timer like me, big cat communication is easily grasped. The roar-moan of a lion says “I’m here, Aslan is in his heaven and all is right with the world”; the polite cough of a leopard says “Um, I’m here, but please don’t tell the lions”.

By the time we reached Etosha National Park on Day Three, I knew that bedding down where no wild animals can be heard was going to feel weird for the rest of my life. My first sunset game drive left me similarly moved; the light soft and brilliant all at once, picking out colours on the birds so startlingly pure that words like turquoise and magenta were invented just to describe them. When our driver Willem pulled over for a bit, we sat in silence near a shallow pool where an ancient bull elephant was drinking alone. Despite his size he could have been vulnerable to predators, yet an act of violence in this moment seemed unimaginable – as if the entire continent was holding its breath at the sheer impossible beauty of an African sunset like none that had come before, or ever would again.

As our vehicle rattled around the park’s rough chalky roads, giraffe and zebra with foals in tow were understandably twitchy and quick to canter off. A pair of elephants bush-bashed away from us through the acacia trees, hips swaying and ears flapping in a show of indignation at such a rude mechanical intrusion during the cocktail hour. Then Willem turned left and the acacias and spiky grasses abruptly thinned and then vanished and we were faced with the astonishing spectacle of four oryx standing on the edge of the world.

The Etosha Pan is a giant salt lake which occupies a quarter of the park, providing the animals with a limitless supply of mineral salt-lick. Against this stark, featureless backdrop, it was also resoundingly clear why the oryx was chosen as Namibia’s national symbol. The handsomely painted face, muscular gait and lethal symmetry of the oryx’s metre-long horns portray a seriousness of purpose that its daintier antelope cousins the impala and springbok could never hope to muster.

A few days later we’d reached the Naukluft Mountains at Sossusvlei – our southernmost destination, and widely held to be Africa’s most beautiful desert landscape. It was not easy to abandon my safari buddies on our last day together, but due to a record rainfall year, the Namib Desert was carpeted in grass and wildflowers for the first time in decades – as the Wild Dog crew headed off for a sunrise trek into the dunes, I was getting ready to see them from a hot-air balloon.

Travelling at exactly the same speed as the wind leaves you with the bizarre feeling you’re not moving at all and the earth is slipping by beneath you as if on a giant conveyor belt. Everything felt so utterly still from the balloon that the sight of an ostrich sprinting below seemed strangely divorced from real time and the real world.

And so at last to my visit with the cats at Otjitotongwe, which would become the perfect remembrance of my visit to Namibia. The Nels – Tollie, wife Roeleen and son Mario – are getting on with trapping problem cheetahs and giving them a safe home. The nineteen currently fenced in on their property no doubt still feel wild, and in fact are only fed haunches of oryx, donkey and kudu because there isn’t sufficient prey inside the 600-acre enclosure. (I fancy there’s a twinkle in Tollie’s eye when he tells me that warthogs burrow under the fence and kudu leap over it, and they don’t last long with the cheetahs.)

Finally I ask Tollie about the future for Namibia’s wild cheetahs, and any trace of gruff Afrikaaner farm-boss is suddenly nowhere to be seen. “We’re hoping to expand the cheetah enclosure as soon as we can afford the fencing” he says with a quiet smile. “It would be nice to be able to rescue more of the cats.”

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