Skeleton Coast - by Ellen

We were glad to see the back of Swakopmund, and we re-traced our steps (I managed not to throw a wobbly this time) along the salt road into the Skeleton Coast National Park. The park gates were fantastic! Huge staring cut outs of the skull and crossbones had been stuck to each gate, and whale bones had been piled along the wall.
We’d been told by a friend that the ‘Skeleton Coast is a strange and creepy place, and the devil lives there’. And I think they may well be right. The wind howled around the car. On our left was mile after mile of crashing waves battering angrily against the dirty white sand. On our right was mile after mile of dirty white sand, stretching to the mountains shimmering in the heat on the horizon. Every so often we would turn off the main road to go and see one of the many shipwrecks, some were no more than the rusting bones of the ship, others had recently met their fate more recently. It was hard not to think of all the people who had been shipwrecked along this coast. The elation at surviving the storm, at being alive and on land must have quickly vanished as they hauled themselves out of the freezing water, onto the sand and clambered over the first line of sand dunes, sure that they’d see green grass and the smoke of a welcoming fire. I think at the point they realized that there was no life in the vast wasteland, and that even if they made it across the desert they’d then have to negotiate the mountains they must have wished that they’d perished in the sea.

Whenever I’d heard of desert mirages, I’d always assumed that you only saw them occasionally, usually when you were lost, tired and dehydrated. But there was ‘water’ everywhere we looked. The spookiest mirage was when we looked over to our left, and saw desert, sea, desert, sea – there shouldn’t have been any land beyond that first line of sea. Trying to figure out which bit was actually land, and which bit was actually sea was really difficult, and you did start to wonder whether you were going crazy, and whether any of what you were seeing was really there at all. Fortunately, before we could enact out our plan to hop out of the car and run over there to have a look, our turning came up and we beat a hasty retreat from this land of mirage and madness.