The Skeleton Coast is the northern shore of Namibia, where the Namib, the oldest desert in the world, meets the cold Atlantic in fog, a coast of dune, gravel plain and surf littered with the wrecks of ships and the bones of whales, with one of the largest colonies of fur seals on Earth at Cape Cross, and it is driven along the salt road from Swakopmund or flown over by light aircraft into the closed northern park. The cold Benguela current offshore brings the fog that rolls over the dunes most mornings, the reason for the wrecks, since ships lost in it were driven onto a shore with no water and no way out, and the Portuguese sailors called it the gates of hell; rusting hulls lie half-swallowed by sand a few metres from the surf, their frames pounded smooth by the waves that put them there, the Zeila near Henties Bay still standing in the breakers. At Cape Cross, where Diogo Cão planted a stone cross in 1486 as the first European on the Namibian coast, Cape fur seals blanket the rocks and sand as far as the eye can see, up to two hundred thousand of them, the pups bawling for their mothers amid the bellow of the bulls.
The desert is watered by fog, not rain. The welwitschia, a plant with just two ever-growing leaves that shreds into a heap on the gravel, lives more than a thousand years on it, and along the shore wind-polished black gravel plains butt up against pale, sculpted dunes in a stark line with the ocean glinting beyond, best seen from the air, where the dunes dissolve into a silver blanket of fog. In the northern park, closed to all but fly-in camps, desert lions walk down the dry riverbeds to the Atlantic and hunt seals and seabirds along the surf, behaviour recorded almost nowhere else. The Skeleton Coast is where the desert drowns ships, and the seals and the lions have the beach.