Namibia: Another World on the Skeleton Coast

 

It's about a kilometer from Shipwreck Lodge to the pounding surf of
Namibia's Skeleton Coast. 

         One of the most desolate places on earth is the northern part of the Atlantic coast of Namibia. It's known as the Skeleton Coast because its beaches were once dotted with the skeletons of wooden sailing ship that had wrecked there. The indigenous San people who live well inland called the region "The Land God Made in Anger," and European sailors called it "The Gates of Hell." 

       Sailors whose ships went aground in the area's thick ocean fog might be able to make it through the typically heavy surf to shore, but in the times before motorized craft it was almost impossible to launch a boat from the shore. Sailors had one choice, to go inland through a hot, arid and very inhospitable desert. Sounds like a great spot for a vacation, right? 

      On Tuesday, May 5, as part of our 2026 trip to Namibia, Zimbabwe and South Africa, we flew into Mowe Bay on this forbidding coast.  It was just us on a small Cessna 210 arranged by Wilderness, the company that helped us plan our trip. From the airstrip, it was a two hours in a four-wheel-drive vehicle on the beach and between sand dunes to our lodge. There are no roads here. In fact, tourists who want to drive themselves have to have four-wheel-drive vehicles and must be part of a caravan, which means paying for another vehicle to lead yours through this terrain. At the end of the drive is  Shipwreck Lodge, the inn that had whetted our interest in the Skeleton Coast.

    The main building and the 10 cabins at Shipwreck look as if they were created from the wreckage of wooden ships, They're all linked by a wooden walk, but the constant wind kept covering sections of the walk with sand, even between the main building and our cabin, which was the closest. 

    Farther inland there are camps that offer chances to see elephants, black rhinos and other wildlife, none of which we saw here.  We did see elephant dung on a ridge a couple of kilometers from the shore, but that was it.  There's a huge seal colony near Mowe Bay that most guests visit either on arrival or departure at the airstrip there. 

      Here are some photos: 

 

Our trip to the Skeleton Coast began at Geluk airstrip near Sossusvlei aboard this Cessna 210.
 With a refueling stop in Swakopmund, the trip took about four hours.

A cat is fondly remembered at the
Swakopmund airport.

The landscape that we flew over seemed like endless desert. 

The drive from Mowe Bay airstrip, where we landed, was on the Atlantic beach
and through sand dunes. There is no road. At Shipwreck Lodge I asked how
food and other goods got there. By truck, once a week, I was told, and it's 
a nine-hour drive each way. 

It looks like a giant spine, and that's what it is:
the spine of a wrecked sailing ship on a beach
between Mowe Bay and Shipwreck Lodge.
Our driver pulled over several times to let us
get close looks at ruins such as this. 

Cabins at Shipwreck Lodge were designed by a Windhoek architect to resemble
the wrecked wooden ships that gave the Skeleton Coast its name.

The lounge in Shipwreck's main building seems
to have capsized. 

Sailors who survived shipwrecks here faced an unimaginable trek accross 
a very dry and very difficult desert. Rainfall here is less than four inches   
(100mm) annually, often as little as .39 inches (10mm), 

 

Our guide Ballack watches as Jane gets onto a waxed board to "surf" down a gigantic dune. 

Ballack drove to the bottom of the dune to pick up
Jane and another surfer.

One of our desert drives at Shipwreck Lodge took us onto a dry seasonal riverbed.  Its
canyon walls were alive with sand, some of it falling like waterfalls, formed as winds 
pushed sand over the edge. Some sand swirled upward, caught in gusts that strike
the canyon walls straight on. 

On our way to the Mowe Bay airstrip to leave the Skeleton Coast, we made a stop to
see Mowe Bay's huge colony of as many as 60,000 Cape fur seals. Some of the 
animals here are dead and will become food for various scavengers like jackals and
even brown hyenas. Most of the seals, though, seemed quite well-fed and healthy.
The stench is similar to that of seal colonies we've seen along the California coast.