'Antony, do us a favour - don't wear that cap on holiday!" The advice is from my South African family. The cap in question has a map of Africa in rainbow colours - the colours of the gay flag. And the holiday is in Namibia. This country made headlines at the Earth Summit in Johannesburg last year, when its president, Sam Nujoma, demonstrated his support for Mugabe's Zimbabwe by publicly scorning Tony Blair. Nujoma has mimicked Mugabe in several ways, including a tendency towards rabid homophobic statements.
Yet this is where my partner, Greg Doran, and I plan to visit. We want to see the Namib Desert and Etosha Pan - and there's another special reason. In 1967, after finishing school in Cape Town, I had to do national service, and my posting was to Walvis Bay, the chief port of what was then South-West Africa, now Namibia. As a weedy, little Jewish boy, whose sexuality was a troubled and hidden issue, the army bore a close resemblence to my worst nightmare. Yet now I'm curious to return, and to show it to Greg. What has happened to the Walvis military base? What will it feel like to go back ?
With an old, anonymous cap shading my head, we start our trip in the south, in the heart of the Namib. Here the dunes are not white or yellow, but a remarkable red colour, pure terracotta. Set against the pure blue of the sky, it's breathtaking. We're staying at Wolwedans Dunes Lodge, a line of log cabins on stilts, with big canvas windows that roll up, opening the rooms to the surrounding desert. The luxurious main suite, which we're occupying, overlooks Losberg, a monolithic lone mountain with fantastic scarring on its flanks, a Namibian Uluru.
On our first sundowners drive, it becomes clear that this is a place to be enjoyed more for its landscapes than wildlife. The latter is sparse - mainly springbok, ostriches and the magnificent oryx, a big oyster-coloured antelope with long V-shaped horns. In late afternoon, we encounter a large herd, a crowd of females and calves surrounding two fighting males, horns locked, silhouettes outlined in sunlit clouds of dust. We sip our sundowners in the dunes above, marvelling at the scene.
But this is nothing compared to the spectacle after dinner, when we switch off the lights in our suite and sit on the deck, gazing up at the night sky. All the stars in the universe are on show here - everywhere you look - more and more, further and further away, the scale impossible to grasp. Heaven is alight.
I wake before sunrise, aware of distant yet familiar sensations... from all-night guard duty in the army... the chill of the desert, the surprising damp, the exceptional silence. Elsewhere in wild Africa, dawn is clamorous with birds and monkeys, frogs and insects. Here, there's nothing. Just immense tranquillity. Then, when the sun rises, it's extraordinarily fast, shooting from the horizon like an orange cannonball and making the whole landscape spring into sudden animation, the big mountain getting to its feet, the dunes flushing with ruddy colour.
During the morning drive, our guide Sylvie points out a peculiar feature. The blonde grass on the dunes is patterned with blank circles - like an outbreak of crop circles. Here the phenomenon is called fairy circles, and numerous explanations abound: local tribes say that they are fighting rings for the oryx; visiting scientists talk about underground termite mounds or poisoning by a little Eidelweiss-like flower. "And what about extra-terrestrial activity?" I ask, my head still ablaze with last night's stars.
En route to Walvis Bay, we fly to Swakopmund in a tiny four-seater plane, a real white-knuckle special. North of Wolwedans, the dunes grow in size dramatically, and all vegetation diminishes, until there's nothing but desert. This is Nature showing off, creating monumental, dream-like sculptures, great craters of red sand and black shade, each masterpiece topped by a snaking, razor-sharp signature, unforgettable, yet instantly surpassed by the next. The wonder doesn't stop here. A low shelf of fog appears and we fly under it, now in a curious underwater light, between the liquid surfaces of the cloud above and the desert below, the sun finding its way through here and there. And suddenly in this totally strange, beautiful, empty world, there's one oryx standing on the highest dune. It looks like a mythic beast, heroically alone, surely the only living thing in all creation. The plane tilts up, we break into blue sky, the vision is over.
Swakopmund was where I, as Rifleman 65833329, used to hitch-hike on weekend passes. It was a friendlier place than Walvis, with colourful, folksy Bavarian architecture (Namibia was a German colony until the end of the first world war) and an attractive seafront. Today it's the premier tourist spot in the country. As we speed out of town with our driver/guide, Hendrik Grunewald, a wise, silverbearded South African, there are desert activities everywhere you look: dune-buggying, dune-skiing, dune-hang-gliding, and someone's even imported a herd of camels for dune caravan trips, the tourists dressed in Arab gear.
Half an hour later, the grey cranes of Walvis harbour come into view. I remember it as a dismal, misty place of fish factories and Lutheran churches. But on this sunny morning 35 years later, it looks almost welcoming. Hendrik drives towards the location of the camp. I feel nervous. I suppose it'll be a Namibian military base now. I wonder if they'll let us near? We turn a corner. And there it is. Or rather isn't. It's been razed to the ground. Nothing is left except a vast square of wasteland.
I climb out of the Jeep, blinking in disbelief. Is this really where I once felt so terrified? I only did peacetime training here, but the bullying in the camp was merciless - whether the snarling abuse from those manbeast mutants called NCOs, or the terrible initiation games which the "oumanne", or older recruits, played on newcomers.
Under apartheid, there were no blacks in the army, so other second-class citizens had to be created - Jews and poor whites being favourites. Here was the old South Africa distilled into its essence, a brutish world of prejudice, intolerance and stupidity.
If I'd had one wish then, it would have been for the camp to vanish off the face of the earth. And that's exactly what's happened! Apparently, my sentiments were shared by SWAPO, then the freedom fighters of Namibia, now the ruling party. Shortly after my stay in 1967, the camp became a command post for the war in Angola, and then the one in Namibia itself. Even when independence was declared in 1990, South Africa still retained Walvis - a vital port on the Skeleton Coast. Then in 1994, it was finally handed back to the Namibians. And the first thing they did was bulldoze the camp.
I expected all sorts of emotions from this visit, but not this - sheer joy, sheer relief. Greg and I take our camera and my gay cap (which we've brought along secretly) and cross to the centre of the rubble. There I put on the cap and do a little dance of joy. You frightened and humiliated me, Mister Macho Army, but guess what? I survived, you didn't. Greg grins: "We've visited some extraordinary ruins together - Pompeii, Knossos, Volubilis - but this takes the cake!"
We go to the lagoon next, an inlet from the sea, where I used to escape on Sundays. Yes, this is familiar: the thick brown sand oozing through your toes, the flat stretch of water dotted with thousands of flamingos and pelicans, sandpipers and terns, too. Then Hendrik takes us into the desert, and with a cry of "Hold on to your hats, chaps", propels his four-wheel-drive to the top of one dune. Here, I get a fine view of the lagoon, and of Walvis, and of my past. All is peaceful.
That afternoon, we fly up to the Etosha Pan Game Reserve. We're staying at Ongava Game Lodge, which lies under a hill that glories in the name of Ondundozonananandana (the place where the boy tending his herd disappeared, feared eaten by a leopard). The rooms are individual bungalows alongside a colossal grey-thatched rondaval, which serves as dining room and bar, and overlooks the lodge's two water-holes. These attract a terrific amount of wildlife, day and night: lion, rhino, giraffe and many buck, including the rare, massive Eland. The game-viewing is so good here that we start to skip the drives. Why spend hours rattling around in a hot, slow Jeep when you can sit on a shaded verandah, sip a G&T, and watch this great procession below, this Noah's ark of animals?
After dark, a unique creature makes its appearance in the Ongava bar. In Afrikaans (which still seems to be the unofficial first language here), it's known as the Wynmot. A moth - big, furry, orange-black - it's distinctive for three things: first, it's alcoholic, with an insatiable craving for wine or beer; second, it's built like a jumbo jet; third, its radar is pathetic and it flies straight into all obstacles - though this could just be part of the drink problem.
Divebombed by these unruly drunks, the guests sit cowed, coasters held over their glasses, until the management run to the rescue, tempting the moths away by setting down saucers of red wine. These turn into miniature watering-holes, where the flying revellers now crash-land and slide about, their long, hollow tongues sloshing to and fro, turning purple with pleasure.
One morning we do a three-hour bush walk with the lodge's manager Jannie Swart, a hefty, gentle-natured Namibian who has a thick Boer accent. He's carrying a rifle. "If we come across lion," he says, "as I did with some guests last week, try not to run. They'll probably be more scared of us, hey. If we come across rhino, lets hope it's white, not black, rhino. Jeez man, he's the only animal I'm scared of here. If he charges - just get into the nearest tree." As we set off, I find myself taking special interest in the local flora. The mopane tree - a bit short and flimsy; the red-barked moringa tree - ah, bigger and better. It also occurs to me that I have a big graze on one leg, and that predators always sniff out the wounded in the herd.
These things are quickly forgotten. It's an intensely peaceful and liberating experience to walk through the African bush. And today, the only dangerous thing we see is Euphorbia Virosa, a tall cactus-like plant which is so poisonous that people have died just from using it as firewood and inhaling the fumes.
On our last morning, we board another tiny plane and fly over the Etosha Pan: the gigantic, white, flat plate of limestone that occupies the centre of the reserve. The pale expanse keeps altering in hue and sheen, now like dry bone, now eggshell, now ash. Nothing lives here. Animals can't cross it. Dust devils and mirages play tricks with the eye. It's hypnotic.
The plane turns south to Windhoek. There we'll catch a connecting flight to Jo'burg - where I can don my rainbow cap again - then home to London. But the white Etosha and the red Namib will stay with me. Both are weird, beautiful and unfamiliar places, not quite of this earth. Appropriate for a journey that was about laying ghosts.
· Antony Sher is appearing in The Roman Actor and The Malcontent until March 22 at the Gielgud Theatre in its season of five Jacobean plays. His autobiography Beside Myself is published by Arrow at £7.99.
Way to go
Getting there: Abercrombie & Kent (0845 0700 611, abercrombiekent.co.uk) offers two nights at the all-inclusive Wolvedans Lodge and four nights at Ongava lodge from £2,650pp. This includes private charter Windhoek-Wolvedans, scheduled shared charter flights Wolvedans-Ongava-Windhoek, and return flights with SAA London/Johannesburg/Windhoek.
Further information:
Country code: 00 264.
Time difference: +1hr.
Flight time London-Jo'burg: 10 hours.
£1 = 12.96 Namibian dollars.
