On the Skeleton Coast the oldest desert on Earth runs into the cold Atlantic, and what decides everything here is fog. The Benguela current chills the sea air until it condenses, and the fog rolls as much as a hundred kilometres inland. It is why ships kept arriving. A crew lost in it saw nothing until the shore was under them, and the shore had no water on it and no way off. Their hulls lie half-buried in sand a few metres from the surf, frames pounded smooth by the same waves that put them there, and your footprints are often the only other mark for kilometres. The trawler Zeila is still standing on a sandbank offshore, cormorants nesting along the rails while the swell goes over it.
At Cape Cross the beach belongs to Cape fur seals. The smell reaches you before the noise does, and the noise is bulls bellowing over pups calling for their mothers; when the pups are born from late November the colony passes two hundred thousand. Diogo Cão planted a stone cross on this headland in January 1486, the first European known to have landed on the Namibian coast. A German warship carried it off in 1893 and it came home in 2020, so what you see on the headland now is a replica. Further along, wind-polished black gravel meets pale dune in a hard line with the ocean glinting past it, and from a light aircraft you watch the dunes dissolve into the fog while the wrecks show as dark specks. In the north, desert lions walk the dry riverbeds down to the Atlantic and hunt seals and seabirds in the surf, which has been recorded almost nowhere else. The same fog keeps the desert alive. Welwitschia grows here on two leaves that never stop growing and are never replaced, shredding into a heap on the gravel, and it lives more than a thousand years on nothing but that mist.