Skeleton Coast

 As you fly in a 16 seater plane to the Skeleton Coast  you feel you could be flying across some other planet.  You see below you vast cream and red dunes, contorted rock formations and huge Atlantic rollers crashing against a hauntingly deserted shoreline.  It takes two hours flying to reach the Skeleton Coast National Park; one of the richest and most spectacularly beautiful desert regions on earth.

 Just 12 people at a time stay in Skeleton Coast camp and on an unforgettable 4 day safari you explore one of the strangest and most utterly remote corners of Africa.  A specialist desert guide takes you in an exploration vehicle like a tiny insect crawling across unending yellow, red and coffee coloured dunescapes sculpted into swirling shapes by the oceanic wind.  Then in the distance an intensely white shoreline shimmers like a mirage against  the blue Atlantic.   An exceptionally good buffet lunch follows with your fellow explorers seated in deck chairs on the beach sensibly upwind of a chaotic colony of 30,000 Cape fur seals.

 If you only visit one place on a Namibian safari it has to be the 400 mile long Skeleton Coast National Park.  Every day you set off for 10 or 11 hours exploring some new wonder.  Between the steep ruggedly weathered walls of the  Hoarasib Canyon flows almost the only fresh water for hundreds of miles, supporting desert elephant, herds of oryx, lion and colourful birds.  You drive down the canyon for three hours, past sand “waterfalls” towering clay castles before emerging again into the bright immensity of the shoreline.

 Over the centuries the whales which feed on plankton sustained by the icy cold ocean drew intrepid whaling ships, many becoming lost in the dense fogs which shroud the coastline, and wrecked.  Great whale bones and planking strewn along the Skeleton Coast are a testimony to the struggle between the whaler and his prey.  To be wrecked on this shoreline was certain death.  Some people do live here, though.  Inland you can meet a tiny community of Himba people who have for centuries survived by oases with their goats which provide almost everything they possess.  The women cover themselves in ochre coloured henna.  Their dignified beauty and complete absence of possessions makes them appropriate custodians of this strange and hauntingly beautiful land.

 Africa Exclusive can arrange for you to visit the Skeleton Coast National Park, either as part of a longer Namibian safari, or as a very exotic short break.