Cappy West in Namibia

Cappy West just wanted a nice place to swim. Meet Cappy West — a friendly capybara with a brass compass, a sage-green bandana, and absolutely no sense of direction. He never sets out to learn anything. The learning just keeps finding him. In Book 5 of Cappy West: The Global Explorer, Cappy sets off across Namibia and gets everything delightfully wrong. He climbs a "small hill" that turns out to be one of the tallest sand dunes on Earth. He tries to ice-skate on a giant floor of salt. He apologises to a plant older than a thousand years and trips right over the biggest meteorite ever found. Along the way, young readers discover real, verified facts about Namibia: the Namib, the oldest desert on Earth, with dunes nearly a thousand feet tall; the Skeleton Coast, where hot sand meets a freezing sea; the largest population of wild cheetahs on the planet; desert-adapted elephants with wider feet and longer legs; ancient rock carvings and the strange thousand-year-old Welwitschia; the salt-white Etosha Pan you can see from space; a hidden underground lake; and the sixty-ton Hoba Meteorite. Every short chapter pairs a funny blunder with a true discovery, a Fun Fact, and a gentle Cappy Tip about kindness, curiosity, and slowing down to notice the world. The book closes with a Travel Scrapbook, a fact recap, and a quiz to share. Perfect for ages 6–8 (grades 2–3), confident new readers, bedtime read-alouds, and homeschool trips around the globe. Each book stands on its own — or collect the whole around-the-world series. "I wasn't lost — I was just taking the scenic route to this fact!"