SKELETON COAST
The vast plains of Namibia end on the banks of the Kunene River, which forms the border with Angola. Travel up the Skeleton Coast to the mouth of the Kunene for scenery, shipwrecks, and fishing where very few have fished before.
“It feels like the Cruiser is sliding down the folds of a velvety blanket, then the engine roars as it strains up the next slope. In the background, the sea shimmers like gold.”
A copy of Amy Schoeman’s book Skeleton Coast (top left) is indispensable when you’re travelling to this remote part of the world. Since the 1970s, the Schoeman family has put more footprints on this coastline than anyone else. Amy’s late husband, Louw, played a vital role in conserving the sparse wildlife (top right), establishing the Skeleton Coast National Park (bottom right) and promoting eco-tourism in the area (bottom left).
The beach at St Nowhere is pretty much the opposite of what you’d expect a beach at a holiday destination to look like: Dark sand is buried under kelp and driftwood; the sea is choppy; and a cold wind breathes down my neck. It’s late afternoon but the sun is invisible, hidden behind a thick bank of grey fog over the Atlantic Ocean.
Where is St Nowhere? Or more importantly, what is St Nowhere? It’s about
100 km north of Henties Bay on the Skeleton Coast of Namibia, and it’s a fishing resort. People don’t come here for sundowners and postcard snaps for Instagram…
I zip up my jacket to my chin and pull my beanie over my ears. I drove here from Windhoek to start a journey to an even more remote place: the mouth of the Kunene River.
The long way north
Dawn is as grey as dusk was yesterday. Coffee does little to warm me up. I’m travelling with a recce team from Bhejane 4x4 Adventures – they’re working on a new tour of the Skeleton Coast. Visitors to the northernmost part of the Skeleton Coast National Park are restricted and only tour operators with a permit may enter the concession area north of Möwe Bay. Only 20 tour groups travel to the mouth of the Kunene each year.
Usually, tour groups spend one day at the river mouth before they head inland to explore the Kaokoveld, but concession holders Skeleton Coast Adventure Tours/OIG have permission to fish in the area. Add birdwatching, dune driving and the knowledge that the nearest town is more than 200 km away, and you’ll want to stay there forever!
Our convoy is made up of two vehicles. I’m with two Namibians in a Toyota Land Cruiser: Phil van Wyk from Gochas is behind the wheel and Pieter de Lange from Mariental is on the back seat. John van den Bergh from Wilderness on the Garden Route is driving behind us in a Toyota Hilux, with Johann Soekoe from George, Bjorn Coetzee from Mossel Bay and Dries Reyneke from Keetmanshoop.
The plan is to drive up the coast to the mouth, camp there for three nights, then turn south to end the trip at Puros. The vehicles are each carrying heavy loads: tents, tables, chairs, freezers, cooler boxes, braai grids, ground sheets, shade nets and crates with food, drink, cutlery and spare parts. There are no facilities where we’re going, and seven people need a surprising amount of stuff to survive!
At the Ugab entrance to the Skeleton
Coast National Park, about 30 km north of St Nowhere, we take a photo in front of the big skull-and-crossbones on the gate. A little further, we pull over next to the rusted remains of an oil drill, then we drive past the deserted Toscanini diamond mine.
The dirt road is long and straight. If I look to the left, I see the icy blue Atlantic; to the right, a flat, dull landscape.
It’s quiet in the bakkie. This stretch of coast has an ominous history. Over the centuries, many ships have run aground here: Gertrud Woermann (1903), Maria Angelina (1923), Heideveld (1968), Winston (1977)... More recently, oil and diamond companies have tried to turn a profit, but once again the landscape proved too inhospitable.
Whether you show up here in a ship or a business suit, nature always wins. The wind is relentless, rust corrodes everything and fresh water is hard to come by. This place eats away at man’s endeavours until all that is left is a skeleton of bone or iron. Some stories are remembered, others are buried beneath the sand.
A dune field rears up near Torra Bay and plucks me from my reverie. It’s about 48 km further to Terrace Bay, a basic holiday resort with a kiosk and a filling station. That will be our last fuel stop and we’ll fill every container we’re carrying.
Sand, shipwrecks and more sand
Phil keeps fiddling with the GPS mounted to the windscreen – it can’t make sense of our route. “A GPS struggles when it’s this remote,” he says.
If you don’t have a concession permit, Terrace Bay is the furthest point you can explore in the park. We’re excited by the promise of the no-man’s land ahead – not many have travelled where we’re about to go. Pieter leans over from the back seat. “You know, this is the furthest I’ve been into north-western Namibia. It’s a big tick on my bucket list!”
From Terrace Bay, a dirt road runs 80 km along the coast to Möwe Bay, the last outpost in the park. This is where the concession area starts. Phil heads to the office to sort out our paperwork.
Möwe Bay is a ranger’s camp in the wilderness. There’s a handful of sun-bleached buildings, a research station and a small museum. The midday sun is bright and hot. A jackal sniffs around the buildings while crows squawk on a roof.
I have a look around the dusty, unmanned museum and take photos of a brown hyena skull, a hand-drawn German poster from 1978, and a lion foetus in a glass jar.
About five people live at Möwe Bay at a time, but today we only find one bored ranger behind the counter. Not many people come here:
4x4 tour groups, guests of Shipwreck Lodge about 40 km further north, and workers at the diamond mine near the Kunene. I look at the signatures in the visitors’ book. Phil says we won’t see the lodge or the mine on our route.
If I knew the bored ranger would be the last person I’d see for the next five days, I would have at least tried to make some small talk…
The dirt road comes to a dead end in the sand. We lower the bakkies’ tyre pressure then head north along the beach.
“There is no more treacherous coast in the world than this,” writes John Marsh in his book Skeleton Coast. “Ships navigating in these waters have to contend not only with a moving coastline, the possibility of uncharted rocks, and the powerful Benguela Current which often sweeps at four knots up the coast, gripping unwary vessels and setting them in towards the shore. They have to contend, too, with occasional subterranean eruptions which change the sea bed, push up islands where there was deep water before and produce other strange and startling phenomena.”
In the book, Marsh recounts the remarkable story of the Dunedin Star – a British steamship en route to Cape Town that ran aground about 80 km south of the Kunene River on the night of 29 November 1942. The rescue operation to recover the 106 passengers took almost a month. Several boats answered the call for help and a convoy of 4x4s tried to reach the shipwreck via an inland route…
About 10 km from the estuary of the Hoarusib, we pull over and take photos of metal shards in the sand. The Dunedin Star? No, the remains of an aircraft – a Lockheed Ventura bomber that flew supplies from Cape Town to the stranded Dunedin crew. It got stuck in the sand after landing and couldn’t take off again. Only later, after the ship’s crew and the aircraft crew had been successfully rescued, a convoy returned to dig out the plane. The aircraft eventually took off again, but one engine gave in about 45 minutes later and the Ventura crashed into the sea about 50 km north of Möwe Bay. Even aircraft aren’t safe on this treacherous coast!
We pass the Hoarusib, and it’s not long before we see the mouth of another wellknown Kaokoveld river, the Khumib. Two springbok graze on the beach between us and the waves.
On the other side of Rocky Point, near to where the Ventura crashed into the waves, seals bask in the sun in stinky colonies. Further up the coast, at Angra Fria, a small peninsula with a weather station, we find the place where the passengers of the Dunedin Star waited for help on the beach. Planks they used for shelter stick out of the sand in front of a memorial plaque erected by Sidney Palmer, one of the shipwrecked, in 2017. Sidney was two-and-ahalf years old when the ship ran aground and the youngest passenger on board.
Phil leads us across a gravelly plain and we look for a place to camp that is sheltered from the wind. We pick a spot up against a rocky ridge but a cold breeze still worries the flaps of my tent.
A jackal visits the camp at sunset, followed by a brown hyena – two of the Namib’s toughest survivors. Not many animals call this rugged landscape home.
Where Namibia ends
We strike camp and drive past Bosluisbaai to a big dune about 10 km south of the mouth of the Kunene. We’ll camp here for three nights. After lunch, the big moment arrives: It’s time to go and see the border between Namibia and Angola.
The Kunene catches you off guard. It spills into the Atlantic in a broad estuary, at least 300 m wide, and the riverbanks are flat so you can’t see the water from a distance. The river flows from the east and simply carves the beach in two as it pushes its brown water deep
into the Benguela Current. I can see Angola on the opposite bank – a mirror image of this side, minus the seven people on the beach.
We plan our activities for the next two days around the campfire later that evening, and we trade theories about the best fishing spots. We’re lucky when it comes to the tides: It’s low tide just after sunrise and high tide in the late afternoon. “You want to fish before and after the tides turn,” says Dries.
Over the next few days, we follow the same routine: Fish early in the morning and late in the afternoon, with a long drive and a nap in between.
By now we’ve grown used to the wind, but it still tests my resolve on the beach. Grains of sand spiral close to the water’s edge and pepper your ankles. If you don’t turn your back to the gale, the salty air burns your throat and stings your eyes.
We try different fishing spots – some are more successful than others. In one spot, Dries catches a kabeljou on his first try, and then pulls out another kabeljou that measures 82 cm in length. “My personal best!” he announces as he jogs back to the water to release the fish. John and Johann reel in a pair of blacktail bream. In the afternoon we explore the dunes around camp in the vehicles. At first it’s hard to determine how deep the valleys are between the dunes because everything is the same colour, but as the sun gets lower the shadows highlight the contours. It feels like the Cruiser is sliding down the folds of a velvety blanket, then the engine roars as it strains up the next slope. In the background, the sea shimmers like gold.
On the second-last day of the trip, we stay at the mouth of the Kunene River until dusk. The serious fishermen try their best to use up the last of their bait.
“Evan, grab this rod,” Bjorn calls. He knows I’m no fisherman. “A big one is going to nibble on this line. I can feel it!”
I reach for the rod, unsure which hand goes where.
“Keep the line taut,” Bjorn explains. “When you feel a jolt, give it a hard tug and reel in.” I drive my feet into the sand, anchor the rod against my hip and stare out over the water. Guess I’ll finally find out what fishermen think about while they wait for a nibble. But I don’t have time to think. Five minutes later I feel a jolt run up the line. The tip of the rod bends over, pointing down to the water like a finger. I jerk the rod and reel in the line, not too fast, pausing occasionally like I’ve seen other men do.
“That’s it! Steady! Steady!” Bjorn cheers me on. There’s something in the foamy shallows, but I can’t see what it is. Then, like a magician unveiling what’s beneath his handkerchief, the wave pulls back to reveal the shiny body of a kabeljou.
“Nice, is that your first kabeljou?” Phil asks as he snaps a photo of me holding the fish. Not only that, it’s the first ever fish I’ve caught on a line!
Once the excitement has died down, I walk around to take photos of the river mouth as the tide turns. I count at least 15 sea turtles in the water. A fur seal pops its head out of the water, shaking the fish in its jaws from side to side. Flamingos fly over the waves; pelicans sit among the reeds; on the beach, ghost crabs scurry to and fro. Every animal is on the hunt for something smaller than itself – the food chain in action. We’re the only creatures watching from the sidelines, participating for the fun of it.
Tomorrow we’ll drive to Puros, where the Omenje Campsite awaits with neatly raked stands, shade trees and a donkey boiler for hot water. We’ll buy cooldrinks at the Manchester United Café while music blares from a small radio. Before long, our phones will start to vibrate as messages pour in and we’ll hear about Covid-19 restrictions and border posts closing for the first time.
But that’s still in the future. Right now, I’m in one of the most beautiful places on earth, where birds ride the south-easterly wind and the Benguela Current wrestles with the waters of the Kunene.
I think back to our first morning at St Nowhere. Back then it already felt like we were camping at the ends of the earth, yet this place is so desolate you can’t even compare the two. When I turn my back on the bakkies, my footprints are the only tracks in the sand. Soon the waves will wash them away and it will be like we were never here at all.