ON THE ROAD SURPRISES - Part 6 - NAMIBIA'S SKELETON COAST

This week returns to my On the Road Surprises series.

I have written several articles, travel essays and short stories about Namibia - here is an edited extract from a published article about the Skeleton Coast:

Our journey continued to the Skeleton Coast; an area we were keen to see. We were booked for one night at Terrace Bay, the most northerly point visitors can drive to on the Skeleton Coast. 

The first thing you notice as you near the coast is the cloud bank.  The second is the sand dunes rolling into infinity.  We arrived at the stark t-junction.  If we turned south we'd eventually reach towns with restaurants and comfortable hotels.  Four vultures crouching by the roadside watched us.  We turned north.

 The air was damp, the sky overcast, the terrain forbidding.  Purple streaked sand dunes loomed on our right and the cold crashing waves of the Atlantic flanked us on our left.  We didn't encounter a single vehicle.

My husband spotted gulls landing on the shore, behind a ridge.  We decided to investigate.  Black-backed jackal and brown hyena (known as strandwolves) patrol the beaches here and we found their prints everywhere.  Perhaps we'd see a hyena on a kill.

Shivering in the chill wind, we cautiously topped the ridge, but there were no animals.  What we found instead were bones.  Hundreds of them.   The whale bones were the easiest to identify and we found an almost intact skeleton of a seal.  Along with the bones were millions of shells.

The Skeleton Coast is so named because of the shipwrecks, but it could equally be named thus for the literal skeletons strewn in abundance.
Even the ocean was conquered at this spot. Sludgy olive green waves fought their way through a carpet of glutinous kelp, to bubble weakly onto the shore. 

It felt like the most desolate place on earth, but possessed an eerie beauty.

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You can read one of my stories which was inspired by this experience HERE


I hope you enjoyed this week's post. See you next week for more On the Road Surprises.

ON THE ROAD SURPRISES - Part 2

In my last post I talked about the joy of surprises when I'm travelling. This next surprise occurred in New South Wales, Australia. I was in Jervis Bay National Park for some wildlife spotting, so it was no surprise to see kangaroos...

What I didn't expect to see was a kangaroo exploring the camp site.

You could almost imagine this one was thinking to itself, 'Tsk! Will you only look at the mess they've left.'

'Now, where do I start tidying this lot up?'


Please feel free to comment if you enjoyed this and I hope you'll look forward to my next surprise.

ON THE ROAD SURPRISES - Part 1

We all love surprises and there is something particularly delicious about being surprised when travelling. I think this is because the traveller is looking at the world around him or her with heightened senses and is hoping to be surprised by something new at every turn in the road. So, when the surprise occurs, the traveller mentally punches the air with a vindicated: YES!

Straw Men pushing bales, France

I was touring in France, in the Midi-Pyrenees with my husband when we rounded a bend and saw a sight that made us slam on the brakes. Here is the fabulously witty open-air art installation that stopped us in our tracks.

If you can turn the surprise into a story or article, all the better.








I hope you enjoyed this travel surprise - I'll be posting more over the next few weeks.