The first stop on the Skeleton Coast was bleak and unappealing Torra Bay for a sandwich lunch next to the roaring surf crashing on the rocks. Allegedly a top spot for beach fishing, Torra Bay was deserted. Next we stopped at Terrace Bay, some 50 km further up the coast, for a final top-up with fuel and to fix a leaking tyre on the Land Cruiser in the mechanics’ workshop around the back.

On this first day on the Skeleton Coast, between the Hoanib River and Möwe Bay, we came across the tracks of two desert lionesses visiting the coast for a change in diet, some seal perhaps. We followed them for a while until we lost their tracks among a herd of springbok. We would catch up with them later. Then, for the next 30 km, the dunes are covered in black magnetite dust from the iron-rich valleys in the interior. The prevailing southwesterly wind keeps the dunes moving at about one kilometre per annum across the Namib and into the interior. The coast grows seaward in some places at an astonishing rate, too, with a shipwreck in the south now lying a kilometre inland!

The thrumming of the dunes, the soo-oop-wa, has been theorised to be due to the gradual compression of the sand as it moves. I felt it when I lay down to sleep that night and found the earth was moving under me – my camp bed was vibrating. I put it down, at least partially, to the strong wave action along the coast, just 50 m seaward of my tent.

We woke to thick fog north of Möwe Bay, and hyena tracks near our camp. The brown hyena is very shy and hard to catch a glimpse of. I never did see one, only tracks. We struck camp and continued north – now completely off-road. The road, as it was, ended at the Möwe Bay Ranger Station where we reduced the air pressure in the tyres even further before heading off north on the beach, to Cape Fria.

All along the beach was strewn, littered even, with sawn and cut pieces of wood, from small crates to sections large enough to be a mast or boom on a square rigger. I did find a boom with iron fittings – behind the Kunene camp building!

Many of the wrecks are known but others remain nameless and mysterious. The passengers of the Dunedin Star – when put ashore, wandered off and came across a wrecked wooden fishing boat five kilometres south of their wreck site surrounded by headless corpses. One passenger went off his head, convinced he had seen his fate in the sand. Indeed, just north of the Karimune wreck, I found the remains of another wooden MFV in the sand, unknown and unidentified. But I could make out that the main engine had once been a big 3-cylinder Lister diesel, which makes it early 20th century.

Wrecks don’t last long in the harsh environment of the Skeleton Coast. Today the 1942 wreck of the Dunedin Star is indistinguishable as anything other than some rusty metal. The wreck and the nearby memorial to the two seamen of the tug Charles Elliott, who gave their lives in the rescue effort, are surrounded by jackal tracks.

Permits to the northern part of Skeleton Coast National Park are time-limited and tourist numbers are also limited, and there must be a 10-day gap between each permit to allow the wildlife to recover. Furthermore, the guides practice what they preach – we never camped closer than five kilometres to a waterhole or a location of wild animals. The animals that came to us in our camps did so out of curiosity or hunger. Not because we were in their spot.

Driving on the beach is an adventure in off-road driving. At one point the track across the salt pans was marked only by sticks stuck into the salty water. I asked what was on the other side of the sticks if I got it wrong and was told quicksand… We stuck to the track! A mud-covered vehicle in the desert is somewhat conspicuous but there was no one around to comment. Namibia has huge underground water resources in aquifers. The ephemeral rivers run underground in the Namib – perhaps hiding their water for future generations.

There are at least 177 known wrecks on the Skeleton Coast. The Portuguese navigators, looking for a route around the Cape, were of course among the first to come to grief on what they called the coast of death – Costa da Morte. In the Herero language, Kaokoveld means the coast of loneliness. Still largely uncharted, with shifting sandbanks, submerged volcanic seamounts and the cold Benguela Current which flows northward from Antarctica at a speed of 5 knots and causes daily fog – all these characteristics make for an extremely dangerous landfall. Bartolomeu Dias, the first man to round the Cape, flirted with the coast and replenished his water supplies at Sandwich Harbour – once well-known as a source where freshwater seeped out of the dunes. Now it is silted over and buried beneath mountains of sand. Other navigators of old sought out other freshwater sources on the Namibian coast. In colonial times the Germans believed they could navigate the Zambezi River to the Indian Ocean and exchanged Zanzibar for the Caprivi Strip in a treaty with Britain.

Onwards, ever northwards, four days more driving on the beach, four more days of ship wreckage, seals, cormorants, tons of whale bones, pelicans, jackals, vultures, hyenas, petrels, snakes and the ubiquitous desert magpies; four days of red iron valleys, green copper valleys, agate and amethyst mountains, and abandoned diamond mines – crossing the Hoarusib and the Kumib river deltas – until I stood on the bank of the Kunene River looking into Angola.

Pelicans were enjoying that the rain in the interior had washed nutrients downriver so that the river mouth was awash with fish. They floated out on the brown river flow, scooping up a few fish here and there before lifting off and flying back to the start of the outflow.

For me: a shower, clean underwear, a cold beer at the Kunene River camp, and a night among the dunes with a clear sky full of stars. Then off across the sand sea that defines the northern border of Namibia’s Skeleton Coast.