The End of the Earth and the Grim Wasteland: Visit Namibia's Skeleton Coast
We've been driving for four hours and we haven't seen a soul. no one. no car. Just an eerie, shimmering void stretching south to the horizon. On the left is the desert, on the right is the sea. A compacted salt road, a fine gap between the two. Under the gray sky, the surfaces of the three gradually disappeared, turning into an indistinguishable gray-brown mass.
We are traveling the Skeleton Coast in Namibia, which many people call the end of the earth.
Looking out through the dusty windshield, it feels like a fitting title. The unadorned Skeleton Coast begins at the Namibia-Angola border in the north and descends 500km south to the former German colonial town of Swakopmund, where strudel bakeries and beer gardens still line the streets – It is here that thousands of Herero and Nama Africans were killed by German soldiers a century ago.
It's a region that combines cultures, landforms and species like no other on Earth, and at times, it feels like a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
In early 2021, halfway through a three-week tour of Namibia, my partner and I were driving along the C34 motorway through this remote, treacherous land. A year ago, we started a new life, we left our home and work in Seattle to travel the world, only a few weeks before our trip was suddenly cut off by the global lockdown, so we are on the first day of the trip. Destination Portugal lived through seven months of lockdown.
At the end of 2020, everything started to slowly reopen, and we decided to try to continue our original itinerary. In doing so, however, we need to answer a few key questions: Which countries currently allow US citizens to enter? (Very few.) Where would be safer to go based on current COVID-19 cases, testing and mask requirements? (Less less.) And not least, if we do get sick, where can we go without burdening that country's healthcare system?
Namibia quickly rose to the top of the shortlist. Being one of the least densely populated countries in the world, allowing us to travel completely independently seemed like a good idea. However, we did not expect that the vast and diverse landscape here would be so shocking.
Knowing very little about the country before setting my sights on it, I immediately delved into its history and geography. While researching the Skeleton Coast, I read about shipwrecks, desolate landscapes and 20th century diamond mining, and I found it fascinating. Its wildness, its desolation, its inscrutability - it captured my imagination and I knew I had to experience it and photograph it.
We enter the gates of Skeleton Coast National Park near the Ugab River, guarded by two crossboned skulls and towering whale ribs. These things are like a warning: "All entrants, please give up all hope."
Before entering 16,000 square kilometers of protected coastline. We had to give our names and information - just in case we couldn't leave before nightfall - in exchange for a transit permit and an appropriate level of apprehension. We held our breath and folded our hands as we drove through the gates, praying that our rental Toyota Hilux wouldn't blow a tire and that we wouldn't be eaten by beach lions in the no man's land ahead.
Sailors, ships, planes and animals lost their lives in this arid desert that ends in the rough Atlantic waves. Rusted hulls, sun-bleached bones—their wrecks now remind us of just how harsh the park's natural conditions have been. It's an uninhabitable place where nothing grows and dangers abound, from rough rip currents to coastal fog.
The park's shoreline is dotted with scattered shipwrecks, attracting tourists. While only a few are still visible, hundreds of ships have died down on this stretch of coast and been slowly consumed by nature. Some wreckage sites are only accessible by plane or four-wheel drive.
In the far north, traces of the Dunedin Star still exist. The British liner Blue Star ran aground ashore in 1942, leaving 106 passengers and crew stranded. A plane and a tugboat were also missing along with several crew members during the rescue operation. To the south, the Edward Boren freighter, which ran aground in 1909, can now be seen down a quarter of the way inland, like a ghost ship surrounded by desert.
We were able to see the wreckage of the South West Seal, which crashed ashore in 1976. All that remains of it are bits of wood and rusted metal sticking out of the sand. And just offshore, the trawler Zeila, which ran aground in 2008 off Henties Bay, is slowly corroding but visible and largely intact, and is now home to dozens of black cormorants.
The few traces of man-made here are in a state of decay: the road signs are faded and decayed, and the abandoned oil rig is nothing more than a pile of rusted iron eroded by time, sand and sea wind. I stopped every few minutes to capture these details with my camera, stretching what should have been a six-hour journey to 11 hours.
Along the way, we passed other wonders, including the seal sanctuary at Cape Cross, home to more than 200,000 stinking seals, and the Walvis Bay Saltworks, where the large salt pans of Indus salt The presence of algal microorganisms presents a bright pink color. Flamingos, also pink, forage for shrimp in the nearby wetlands. The road north of Swakopmund is lined with makeshift tables; there are dozens of pale pink halite crystals on them, and often a rusty cash box nearby, waiting for honest passers-by to leave a few bucks in exchange for baby.
The barren land gives people a feeling of a different world, primitive and powerful. Both exciting and scary. The coastline and colors are slowly changing and the sand turns red as we continue south into the Namib-Naukluft National Park, home to the oldest desert in the world, the Namib Desert.
The Namib Desert, which has existed for at least 55 million years, bears the same name as the young country (Namibia gained independence in 1990). Over millennia, its towering sand dunes have sunk into a churning sea.
When we have chosen this lonely part of the world, it awaits us with great loneliness and alienation. This is what we seek - yes, escape from human-transmitted disease, but also escape from the hardships of our everyday lives. Namibia makes us feel small and insignificant in the best way possible - a feeling I often crave in a world of instant gratification and constant attention grabbing from me. In the end, Skeleton Coast is a strange and beautiful reminder that we humans are powerless in the face of time, and that in the war between man and nature, nature always wins.
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