The Skeleton Coast takes its name from the bleached whale and seal bones that once lined its beaches, and from the rusting ships that keep washing up to join them. Here the Namib — the world's oldest desert — runs straight into the cold Atlantic along one of the most treacherous shorelines on Earth, where near-daily fog and shifting sandbars have wrecked vessels for five centuries. Portuguese sailors called it the Gates of Hell; the San people of the interior knew it as the land God made in anger. The cold Benguela current chills the sea air into thick banks of fog that drift far inland, and this fog, not rain, is what keeps the desert alive. At Cape Cross in the south, one of the world's largest Cape fur seal colonies swells past 200,000 animals in the breeding season, on the headland where Diogo Cão planted a Portuguese stone cross in 1486. Further north stretches Skeleton Coast National Park, a near-empty wilderness where desert-adapted elephants and lions range the dry riverbeds.
The wrecks are what most people come to walk among. The trawler Zeila lies impaled on a sandbank just offshore, cormorants roosting along its rusted rails as the surf explodes against the hull, while older hulks lie half-swallowed by the dunes. Mornings start under a cool grey fog that burns off by midday into hard desert light over gravel plains and towering dunes, and the bark and stench of the Cape Cross colony carry for kilometres on the wind. The far northern reaches are among the least-visited places on the continent: the park's wilderness section is permit-only and can be reached only by light aircraft or guided 4x4, which is exactly why it stays so raw. Most travellers therefore arrive by air, following the empty shoreline from the window on the way in.