For location, you can't do much better than the Beach Hotel Swakopmund: the beach is a stone's throw away and you're halfway between the breezy barefoot-cool of Gull's Cry Beach Bar and the more mature Tug Seafood Restaurant and the newly opened Jetty Restaurant and Oyster Bar. The town centre - more restaurants, coffee shops, galleries, craft shops and gift shops - is about five minutes walk.

Holidays are tough. With all the unwinding and relaxing you have to do it's easy to forget where you are, even if it's somewhere strangely sandwiched between a dune-decorated desert and a shipwrecked coastline. Fear not, for the glorious rooftop terrace with its 360-degree view of town, dunes and sea will help you with your bearings.

The Atlantic's chilly and, let's face it, challenging current (hence the Skeleton Coast shipwrecks) isn't always ideal for swimming so the Beach Hotel built you a rooftop pool to go with the view. In summer the pool is heated, in winter it's a sparkly decoration. Evening aperitifs - 'sundowners' as we like to call them - are perfect from the rooftop as the sun sets conveniently over the sea. That'll do nicely, thanks.

The Hotel has 34 rooms and apartments all washed in floor-to-ceiling tones of beachsand and blue-grey sea. Dark mahogany colonial-style furniture anchors the contemporary edges and the odd splash of silver-blue colour complements the view from your balcony - we'll always do our best to book you into a sea-facing room.

Anchor Point, the Beach Hotel's elegant in-house restaurant, does a fine job competing with the overwhelming choice of Swakopmund eateries. The menu is exhaustive featuring Namibian specialities of which seafood and red meat take centre stage.