SKELETON COAST
The Skeleton Coast is one of the most infamous stretches of coastline along the west coast of Africa-its ghostly shipwrecks on remote and inaccessible shores have given it the well-deserved name of Skeleton. Stretching from the Atlantic Ocean coast of Namibia and South of Anglo from the Kunene River south to the Swakop River, the Skeleton Coast and its hinterland is a landscape of haunting beauty, a vast area of rolling sand dunes, expanses of uninhabited desert plains, fossil beds, desert-adapted animals, unique geological formations and strange vegetation. Today the Skeleton Coast is known as Skeleton Coast National Park because it covers 2 million-hectares of land (about one-third of Namibia’s coastline) and this most inhospitable and least visited land is divided into the northern and southern section.
The oldest types of rock at the Skeleton Coast are mica schists, gneiss and granite, part of the Damara sequence which was deposited between 1000 and 700 million years ago. The landscape as it is today seems much the same as it must have been a thousand, ten thousand or even a million years ago. Glass-like pieces of lava which boiled, bubbled, burst and solidified in aeons gone by appear so well preserved that they might have been created in a cataclysm that occurred yesterday. In the northern Skeleton Coast you can find Garnet sand and fine black particles of magnetite, tinged green with drying out plankton, creatind an ever changing texture on the beach. One can also find a panorama of dunes on the extensive Sarusas plain north of the Sarusas Fountain in the Khumib River.
A large number of animals found in the dry river beds include desert elephant and black rhino, as well as gemsbok (oryx), kudu, steenbok, springbok, jackals, genets, zebra, lion and cheetah and small wild cats as well as brown hyena. Another highlight of this area is the seal colony at Cape Fria. Birthing time is late November to early January when the great, smelly mass of seals can be seen fighting, fishing and rearing their pups at close quarters. In the past the lions strayed onto the beach to hunt seals, but for many years lions have not been seen on the beach. Most of the plant and insect species depend on the thick fog that covers the coast for their moisture.
We invite you to this amazing landscape.
