Where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Skeleton Coast

livemint.com:

The Burning Shore. Like most of his novels, it is set in the backdrop of the brutal yet beautiful continent of Africa. This one takes the reader into the desolate and dramatic wilderness of Namibia in 1917.

From 1884-15, most of what is the Republic of Namibia today was a colony of the German Empire. In The Burning Shore, Smith describes the town of Swakopmund in 1917 as “a startling touch of Bavaria transported to the southern African desert, complete with quaint Black Forest architecture and a long pier stretching out into the sea". In June this year, when I rolled into Swakopmund as part of Mahindra Adventure’s Authentic Namibia Expedition, I saw that the description still rang true.

I walked that long pier one evening, originally built from wood 1905 and then, in 1911, with iron. The first civilian homes here were in fact prefabricated in Germany and transported by ship during the closing years of the 19th century. Even today as one walks around Swakopmund, there is a German air to it thanks to its architecture.

I was in Namibia to explore its wilderness, and Swakopmund was where the tarmac ended. We headed north towards Henties Bay on a sandy track with the Atlantic Ocean to our left, the beach littered with sea kelp that had been washed ashore. The Atlantic’s littoral in this part of Nambia is the Namib Desert with its ever-shifting dunes that the wind is constantly sculpting.

This was Namibia’s infamous Skeleton Coast. Most mornings the wind, chilled by the cold Benguela current running northwards along the west coast of southern Africa, blows inland and condenses the hot desert air into a dawn mist that is chased away as the sun goes high and strong. As we drove through this mist of whimsical translucence, I