"Make your footprint count!" Yeah, yeah, the concept of eco-this or eco-that is rapidly becoming a cliché, what with pseudo eco-lodges, eco-tours and eco-estates springing up like weeds. So we were just a trifle sceptical when we were invited to the maiden safari of a new tourism company in Namibia.

Having done it, there's no arguing that Conservancy Safaris Namibia (CSN) are genuinely walking the walk - not least because the operation is owned by five community conservancies in Namibia, with all proceeds from its activities going not to some distant corporation but straight back to the 1 800 people who live in those communities.

Add that feel-good factor to a remarkable safari experience, and it's a winning formula. Try following black rhino on foot with a local tracker. Or sitting transfixed at your luncheon table as seven elephant stroll right into your camp. Or eyeballing a pride of magnificent desert lion, then joining in the debate with the local community on how lions and people can live together. And that was just for starters.

CSN is funded by a loan from two Scandanavian entrepreneurs who fell in love with the Namibian desert, and are long-term private supporters of Namibia's well-documented community-based natural resource management programme. CSN's activities are directed through a non-profit registered trust with professional advisers, but ownership vests in the community conservancies of Puros, Sanitatas, Okonjombo, Orupembe and Marienfluss, all situated in the spectacular north-western Kunene region.

Safari veteran Russell Vinjevold, with more than 28 years conservation and tourism experience in South Africa and Namibia, is CEO and will lead most of the tours.

As we sip fine red wine at our campsite above the Hoanib River, he explains the concept: "Revenue flows to the communities both directly and indirectly - to the five co-owner conservancies, and to any other conservancies we visit. We pay fees to stay in conservancy campsites. We pay traverse fees to cross conservancy lands. In each owner-conservancy, we pay for community hosts and campsite assistants.

"Any profits we make, after direct costs and repayment of the soft loan, flow straight back to the five owner-conservancies themselves."

The key difference, and it's palpable, is that you feel not so much a tourist as a guest of the local community. In each owner conservancy, a community host joins the tour.

In remote Okonjombo we sat at our campsite in a river bed washed bone-white with moonlight, swapping anecdotes late into the night with veteran game guard Ngeve Tjikaho. We talked about marriage, children, death; about life in this aridly beautiful desert region.

Says Lucky Kasaona, the Herero headman who was with us: "We're making real contact with the people, and the communities themselves are benefiting."

And there should be benefits to share. The safaris are not cheap. The flagship Kunene Kaleidoscope trip costs R43 200 per person for 10 days and nine nights, with pick-ups from either Windhoek or Walvis Bay. Shorter specialist tours, focusing on the desert elephant or lion, or on culture and conservation, are also offered at R24 975.

So what do you get for your money? We flew into Walvis and were collected by Russell in a brand new Land Rover. Off on the long drive through the Skeleton Coast National Park to our first stop - not at a campsite, but at Wereldsend, the legendary base camp of the Integrated Rural Development and Nature Conservation (IRDNC) organisation, from where the now national community-based conservation programme was piloted in the 1980s.

We start with a visit to the "rhino graveyard" - a collection of the bones of rhino, elephant and giraffe, mostly victims of poaching that nearly wiped out Kunene's wildlife in the 1980s. Around the campfire, IRDNC founder Garth Owen-Smith talks passionately about the community conservation programme, setting the context for the safari experience that will follow. IRDNC, whose role includes driving initiatives that bring sustainable revenue to local communities, has helped establish the CSN business in a non-profit advisory capacity.

Next morning we set off with local tracker Philemon Nuab into Torra Conservancy. Only a few kilometres past cattle at a borehole we spot a black rhino and her calf. Philemon lopes effortlessly into the stony hills and we stumble behind.

Soon he waves us to a halt and positions us on a rocky outcrop. "The rhino are there" - he indicates a patch of scrub - "and if you keep quiet they will come..."

They do. We crouch among the rocks, hardly breathing, as the rhino browse until they are just below us. A clink of rock and Big Mama whirls to face us. It's one thing to watch rhino from a vehicle. It's entirely another experience to be eyeballed by a one-ton beast from less than 100m in the open veld.

Big Mama is wary but not aggressive. The message is inescapable - this is our place, you are the interloper. After watching junior take a nap in his mother's shade, we creep back to the vehicle, exhilarated.

"Remember, this is not a game park," says Garth. "This is communal land, farmed by the local people and shared with the wildlife. People are now looking after the game. That's what is unique; conservancies give the animals much more space than putting them in a park. But community conservation can only work when natural resources, including wildlife, generate real benefits for conservancy members."

The next night finds us in Sesfontein Conservancy at the astonishing Gunamub Mountain camp, perched among the gigantic boulders that have tumbled down the mountainside. Our tents are pitched by the cheerfully efficient CSN crew on different levels amid the rocks, and we gather around the dinner table to watch the setting sun paint the hills golden ochre and the full moon rise into a mauve sky. Memories of the city fade away.

Each day is built around a highlight. One hot morning we set off on foot from the floor of the dry Gunamub River in search of water pools in the rocks towering above us. As we clamber upwards, it seems impossible that elephant can thread their way through the steep, narrow passes and up massive rock steps, but plentiful droppings speak for themselves. At the top we reward ourselves with a dip in an icy pool. Back down in the riverbed we see many elephant, including one bad-tempered bull who half-heartedly charges us - thankfully when we're back in the vehicle.

But the elephant experience of note comes in the Puros Conservancy camp site. As we laze around the lunch table, no fewer than seven elephants, an old bull and six full-size youngsters, wander into camp to feed only metres away. The sign nailed to a tree - "Do not leave food where it can be seen or smelled by elephant" - becomes very real... as real as the rumble of the old bull as he keeps the youngsters under control.

Russell speaks softly: "Sometimes there is conflict between animals and people. Imagine your child playing here now. But people know that sharing their land with wildlife is directly contributing to a better future. So the animals are worth more alive than dead."

In the Hoarusib River we come face to face with that reality, after we track and watch a pride of five desert lion lounging on the warm sand, waiting for nightfall and the hunt. There's nothing in the world like being fixed by the flame-tawny gaze of an adult lion only metres away - even from within a vehicle.

But the pride male is missing - and is spotted that night in the bush only 100m from the village. Russell's words - "imagine your child playing here now" - take on real meaning.

Community leaders gather under a giant kameledoringboom to decide what to do. People join from far and wide, most carrying their own chairs to the meeting. "It's not unusual to walk 30km to attend such a meeting," says Chief Lucky.

We're invited to join as spectators, and are surprised to hear the conservancy chairman proclaim: "These are our lion." Only a few years ago this lion would have been shot. Instead, the conservancy now calls on the services of Dr Flip Stander, founder of the Desert Lion Conservation project. The male, already fitted with a tracking collar, is darted and the batteries replaced. The experience is disconcerting enough to send him back into the river bed with the rest of the pride, and away from the village. Livestock have already been moved to another area.

Flip is now training several local men to operate the tracking equipment so they can trace the lions for visitors, thus bringing revenue to the community - and to be alerted if the great cats approach the village or livestock. This is community conservation at work.

And so our 10 days fly by. There's a trip through the magnificent Marienfluss valley, a vast, grass-covered plain (grassy at the moment, after excellent rains). We break for a cooling swim in a rockpool on the Kunene River, as we gaze into neighbouring Angola.

Some nights we camp in the desert; other nights we enjoy hot showers and flush toilets in conservancy camp sites (what luxury after a day in a dusty vehicle). It's beyond comfortable; our tents are put up and taken down for us, bed rolls laid out, canvas water basins prepared, simple but wholesome meals cooked and drinks kept chilly in the vehicle fridges. Ice is produced for the nightly G&Ts, and even ice cream after a hearty Hungarian goulash.

Most of all, it's authentic. It's often hot, it's usually dusty, the distances are vast and the roads often little more than rock-strewn tracks. This is serious 4x4 country; no place for Sandton softies with designer mud on their luxury SUVS. This is the real Africa, not a sanitised package tour. We've met, dined with and shared experiences with our conservancy hosts, as their guests. We've slept under indigo night skies with an endless array of stars. We've gazed on astonishing vistas. We've seen lion, elephant, giraffe, gemsbok, kudu, springbok, jackal and much more. And we've seen it from the inside.

Many tourists visit this great open space to see the wildlife. But few will share this feeling of having got under the skin of Namibia; of understanding just a little more deeply the harsh but magnificent life of the desert - and to feel, that for once, yes, our footprints have really counted.

For more information visit www.KCS-namibia.com.na.