Travels with Myself by Tahir Shah

Author:Tahir Shah
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: travel literature, travel writing, India travel writing, India travel literature, South America travel literature, South America travel writing, Africa travel literature, Morocco travel writing, adventure travel, travel memoir
Publisher: Secretum Mundi
Published: 2012-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

On the Skeleton Coast

STREWN WITH HUGE BLEACHED WHALE-BONES, shipwrecks, and the occasional human skull, Namibia’s Skeleton Coast is one of the most desolate shorelines on the African continent. Known to the Khoisan Bushmen of the interior as ‘The Land God Created in Anger’, it’s where the freezing waters of the Atlantic meet the scorched sands of the Namib desert.

Stretching from the Angolan border, at the Kunene River in the north, down beyond the diamond ghost-town of Kolmanskop in the south, the Namib is a vast swathe of undulating dunes. Far too dry to sustain much life, the flora and fauna found there have adapted, enabling them to glean just enough moisture from the ocean’s fog that spills inland at dawn.

Venture to the Skeleton Coast, and you get the sense that nature is warding you away right from the start. There are bones everywhere, flotsam and jetsam, the crumbling hulks of wrecks, dead plants, and the footprints of infrequent desert creatures, all of them on the constant and desperate search for sustenance.

Hanging in the balance, a slim no man’s land between life and death, I was reminded time and again by the struggle to survive. It was a point never more powerfully made than on my first morning on the Skeleton Coast.

I was moving clumsily across a towering sand dune which rolled down to the beach and into the foaming white breakers. There were no plants, no animals, no hint of anything alive, just the spectre of Death all around. As I took a swig of water from my flask, a male oryx came out of nowhere. Alone and weak from thirst, he stumbled down to the shore, tasted the salt water, and collapsed on the beach.

A great uncompromising chunk of Africa, Namibia is one of the last true wildernesses. It’s a place where a few drops of water have at times been far more precious than the diamonds that famously litter its coastal sands. Nonetheless, it’s blessed with a stable government and decent infrastructure, something you can’t say about a good many countries on the African continent.

Tearing south-west up from Antarctica, the trade winds of the Benguela system batter the shoreline night and day. No one knows quite how many ships they’ve swept onto the barren rocks of the Skeleton Coast. But, making your way southward, you spot wreckage every few miles.

There are the remnants of ocean liners and trawlers, galleons, clippers and gunboats – testament to the perfidious current and the unrelenting winds. The wreckage is only one piece of the puzzle, but one with which we all readily identify – the crushed remains a reminder of our own fragility.

The most infamous of the wrecks is the Dunedin Star. A Blue Star liner, it was washed ashore in 1942. Laden with munitions, crew, and a few paying passengers, the ship’s rescue has gone down in history as a catalogue of error. A Ventura bomber and a tug-boat, both sent to help, floundered as well. Their wreckage can still clearly be seen.

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