The Eerie, Lunar Nothingness of Namibia’s Skeleton Coast

We had been driving for four hours and had yet to see another soul. No people. No cars. Just eerie, lunar nothingness stretching south to the horizon. To the left, desert; to the right, ocean. A packed salt road sewed a tight seam between the two. Under an overcast sky, the three surfaces faded into a single indistinguishable gray-brown smear.

We were traveling along Namibia’s Skeleton Coast, a region often referred to as the end of the Earth.

Given the view through the dusty windshield, the title felt apt. The untamed Skeleton Coast begins at Namibia’s northern border with Angola and continues 300 miles south to the former German colonial town of Swakopmund, where strudel-filled bakeries and beer gardens still line the streets — and where, a century ago, thousands of Africans from two ethnic groups, the Herero and the Nama, were killed by German soldiers.

The region contains a combination of cultures, landscapes and species unlike anywhere else on Earth, at times evoking a post-apocalyptic wasteland.