Namibia

Namibia hit different from anything I expected. The north of the country — around the Kavango and the villages near Rundu — was impossibly green when I was there, deep rainy-season green that made the red dirt roads glow like they were lit from underneath. The air smelled of wet soil and woodsmoke, and the sky kept doing things I hadn't seen before: huge cotton clouds stacking up over flat land, light cutting through at angles that made even a roadside hut look like something worth stopping for.

The food surprised me too. I had an oryx chop at a lodge one evening — proper game meat, a little gamey, a little smoky, with mashed potato and a glass of red. It was the kind of meal where you slow down and actually notice what you're eating. Breakfast the next day was eggs benedict with coffee so thick it practically stood up on its own. Nothing fancy about the setting, but everything tasted deliberate, like whoever made it actually cared.

What stayed with me most was the scale. Standing next to a baobab tree that has been growing there for centuries, the trunk so wide it took four of us to reach around it, I felt genuinely small — not in a bad way, just honest. Namibia keeps reminding you how old the land is and how briefly you're passing through it.