Chelsia Tongue is enjoying the peace of the Namibian bush as much as the plentiful sightings of big game - especially once the scorching sun has set

Etosha: the place of great emptiness. Even the name is magical! This is a very different sort of wilderness: an animal wilderness: a place where humans are incidental, animals hold sway, and nature reclaims primacy.

There are no life forms whatsoever on the salt pan: no animals, not a scrap of vegetation of any sort, not even a bird flying over. The pan is a fearful sight - absolutely flat, with grey-white salt sand stretching to limitless horizons, so huge it can be identified from space. It is frightening just imagining being stranded in all that desolation. Nothing could possibly survive!

Thankfully, though, the rest of the park is more hospitable. Huge expanses of yellow grasslands stretch for miles, then tracts of mopane trees fling green streaks across the savannah. Scattered in between, patches of scrubby acacia huddle themselves into large, thorny black and white clusters. Some have a bit of colour, dotting the landscape with bright yellow pompoms - fruit which the springbok love. Others add percussion to the bird chorus, rattling their seedpods in the wind.

There is a lot of everything here. There are animals galore, their numerous tracks leading off the roads into mysterious places where no human can follow. Patience is also plentiful - and integral to this wilderness. Nothing happens in a hurry: driving along the stony, dusty roads hardly troubles the speedometer needle, the animals walk at a stately pace, and only leisurely waterhole vigils are rewarded. And there's the heat! So much of it! My night-time thermals are discarded by 7am, and by 8 only shorts and sandals are bearable. My water is permanently tepid and an icy coke is warm before it is finished. By noon I am gasping for some shade - only there isn't any accessible to humans confined to their vehicles - this is the animals' land! They have right of way here, and the sight of a herd of springbok slowly and very deliberately crossing a road and holding up 4x4s six deep is one to cherish when set against rush hour on the Finchley Road.

Picture this: it is an utterly still early morning at the Moringa waterhole. The new sun is just tingeing the water a delicate, pink, giving a mystical quality to the perfect reflection of the horn bill in the mirror-still water. In the bush something moves - a lioness slinks round, casing the joint. With a slow saunter she meanders through the bush for about half an hour, getting slowly closer to the waterhole. Then five other lions appear and slowly follow a more direct route to the water, drinking long and hard before slowly merging into the bush again.

Or imagine this: 12noon at the Goas waterhole. The sun is beating ferocious heat into the sand and rocks, and two lions rest in the shade of a huge tree trunk. Very slowly a giraffe lopes out of the trees, pausing every few minutes to blend with a tree trunk. Back and forth she warily ambles for an hour, getting closer to the water each time. When she is almost there, seven other giraffe appear from the trees and head for the water in long, lazy, loping strides. The lion, obviously replete, lifts his head towards them, then continues his doze. Meanwhile zebra, kudu, impala, steenbok, gemsbok and the ubiquitous springbok wander nonchalantly around, the younger springbok and impala energetic enough to spar, the zebras splashing in the water.

Or early evening: the sun, a huge red balloon, hangs for a moment in a violet sky before dropping suddenly below the horizon. The water in the Halali waterhole fades from bright aquamarine to deep blue-black. There is absolute silence and an air of expectancy amongst the human animals perched with binoculars and cameras on the rocky hillside. As darkness wraps round the floodlights fade up. A lapwing struts slowly round the edge of the waterhole and the hordes of noisy francolins waddle bossily to the water. Quelas swoop round in shape-shifting swarms and a goshawk keeps a beady eye on it all from his perch in a moringa tree. There is a movement behind an acacia tree and the francolins screech back into the bush, but it is only a jackal - the hillside vigil continues. There is no moon: just a huge crowd of stars against the soft black night, so very many of them; haven't they heard of population control? But it is a relief to feel the heat drain from the day and to sit in still, patient harmony with the animals in these vast plains.

This then is Etosha - an exaggerated, enchanting place where even the starlings nibbling at my breakfast crumbs are not black, but an impertinently bright, iridescent blue, and that strange hoot is not an owl but an elephant calling its young.

But long after the thrills of big game sightings and the excitement of spotting exotic birds have faded, it is the quiet of the place which lingers, and seeps into me like the comforting, warm glow of that great, red sunset: the peace and the stillness of this vast African bush night.