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At 5. 26 pm on 14 November 2022 we stood on shifting sand, and in pleasantly cool air.
Below, in front of us, was the Atlantic Ocean, lapping Namibia’s “Skeleton Coast”.
We stood in a “sea” of sand – sand, only, it seemed.
However, the beach/coastal plain below us was clearly not devoid of vegetation.
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The world’s oldest desert gives its name to one of the world’s sunnier, hotter, dryer (and least-populated) nations.
Q: so why would a series that celebrates the northwestern portion of the Namib Desert begin with a photo taken on an Atlantic Ocean beach, as obviously-moist air swirled around me, on a cool early evening?
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The mangled – but not rusted – metal object pictured above has sat on one of the world’s most “desolate” beaches since shortly after 29 January 1943.
It is an engine cowling from a Lockheed Ventura bomber which plunged into the nearby Atlantic on that day, off Namibia’s Skeleton Coast.
A short distance inland – as you can see, above – is the western edge of the world’s oldest desert’s “sandsea”.
That Ventura, several other planes, a number of ships, and a land-based convoy’s extraordinarily arduous/audacious mission were all part of an amazing true story of shipwreck/s, a plane-crash, and herculean rescue efforts.
MV Dunedin Star’s demise resulted in far fewer deaths than did RMS Titanic’s, but the smaller vessel’s end-story is, arguably, the more “titanic”.
One CommentAlso starring a fine example of “sleepless rust”, this post’s featured image is much easier to “read” than was the immediately-preceding, teasing post’s.
Obviously, here, you are looking at a shipwreck.
No reliable figure is even possible, but it is generally reckoned that Namibia’s Skeleton Coast is the world’s largest “ships’ graveyard”.
At least several hundred vessels – quite possibly, more than one thousand – have succumbed to its “treacherous” mists, turbulent waters, “carnivorous” rocks.. and to its utter remoteness.
For several centuries, sailors who outlived their ship would, inevitably, soon share its fate – on a shore where rain hardly ever falls and no rivers permanently flow.
Until well into the 20th century this was a place no road reached, and where no humans lived.
Even so, whales have provided far more of the Skeleton Coast’s skeletons than have ships and sailors.
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Namibia’s Skeleton Coast is one of the world’s starker, least-peopled, least-rainy shorelines.
Apparently, its name refers to its extraordinary high number of visible skeletons/bones of two things – whales and ships.
However, whales and ships are not the only providers of startling “skeletons”…
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As even the most cursory googler will discover almost instantly, “facts” and opinions concerning Namibia’s seal population and human “management” thereof are widely/wildly divergent/contested.
Suffice for now that all of Namibia’s seals are Cape Fur Seals, and that an enormous number (and major proportion of the global population) of them live and die on Namibia’s coast.
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