Swakopmund, Damaraland & the Skeleton Coast

The north-west holds some of Namibia's oldest human traces. Hunter-gatherers carved thousands of animals, footprints and symbols into the sandstone at Twyfelfontein and painted the rock shelters of the Brandberg over thousands of years. Later the Damara, Nama-speaking herders and the Herero-speaking Himba settled the interior, and the Topnaar, a Nama group, lived along the lower Kuiseb river near Walvis Bay.

The Portuguese navigator Diogo Cão planted a stone cross at Cape Cross in 1486, but the desert coast deterred settlement for centuries. Walvis Bay's harbour drew whalers and traders, and in 1878 Britain annexed the bay, which later became part of the Cape Colony. Germany, shut out of the only good harbour, founded Swakopmund in 1892 as the port for its colony, built a railway inland to Windhoek and a jetty and mole against the surf. When Namibia became independent in 1990, South Africa kept Walvis Bay until handing it over in 1994.

Under South African rule, the Odendaal plan of the 1960s created the homelands of Damaraland and Kaokoland, names still used for the regions today. The Rössing uranium mine near Arandis opened in 1976 and made Erongo a mining region. Since independence, community conservancies in the Kunene have helped desert-adapted elephants and black rhinos recover from heavy poaching in the 1970s and 1980s.

The coast has a strong German-Namibian character: Swakopmund's German speakers, Lutheran church, bakeries and half-timbered buildings make it feel like a seaside town of another era, while Walvis Bay is a working port with a mixed Afrikaans, Oshiwambo, Nama and Damara population. Mondesa and Kuisebmond, the townships built for black workers, are large neighbourhoods of the two towns.

Inland, the Damara speak Khoekhoegowab with its click consonants and look to their own king and traditional council; Damara annual gatherings and choirs are important social events. In the Kunene, the Himba keep a semi-nomadic life based on cattle, goats and seasonal grazing. Himba women coat their skin and hair in otjize, a paste of red ochre and butterfat, and wear leather skirts and elaborate hairstyles that signal age and status. Sacred fires at homesteads link families with their ancestors.

Tourism has created difficult questions in Kaokoland: some villages welcome visitors on paid, community-run terms, while casual visits by tour vehicles are resented. Himba leaders have also opposed plans for a hydroelectric dam on the Kunene river that would flood ancestral land and graves.

Walvis Bay and Swakopmund, close together along the coast, are Namibia's second urban centre after Windhoek and among its fastest growing. Walvis Bay's deep-water port handles most of the country's sea trade and serves landlocked neighbours through road corridors inland, and its fishing fleet and fish-processing plants land hake, pilchard and horse mackerel from the Benguela current. Swakopmund lives from tourism, retirement and the uranium mines at Rössing and Husab in the desert behind it; green hydrogen and port expansion are the new hopes.

Inland Erongo has small towns such as Omaruru, Karibib, Usakos and the old tin-mining town of Uis. In the Kunene, Opuwo, Outjo, Khorixas and Kamanjab are service towns for communal farmers who herd goats and cattle on arid land, and drought regularly forces herders to move stock far from home. Conservancy jobs, lodge work and trophy-hunting fees provide cash, but unemployment is high and informal settlements ring the coastal towns.

The coast eats from the Atlantic, and restaurants in both towns serve kingklip, hake, kabeljou and other line fish, calamari and rock lobster in season. Anglers along the Skeleton Coast's beaches cast for kob and steenbras.

Swakopmund keeps its German cooking: bakeries for rye bread, Brötchen and Kuchen, cafés serving Apfelstrudel and Black Forest cake, and beer halls offering Eisbein (pork knuckle), schnitzel and sausages with local lager. Game meat — oryx, kudu and springbok — appears on menus as steaks, stews and biltong.

Inland food is simpler. The Himba live largely on maize porridge, soured milk and occasional meat, and Damara households add wild foods from the veld. Along the Kuiseb, the Topnaar harvest the !nara melon, a spiny desert plant whose fruit pulp and large seeds are both eaten.

Swakopmund's colonial buildings, jetty, museum and palm-lined seafront are a pleasant base, and the dunes between it and Walvis Bay, including the tall Dune 7, offer sandboarding and quad-biking. The Walvis Bay lagoon holds flamingos and pelicans, boat trips visit seals and dolphins off Pelican Point, and Sandwich Harbour to the south is reached by 4x4 over the dunes. Inland, the "Moon Landscape" and the ancient welwitschia plants lie along the Welwitschia Drive, and the Spitzkoppe granite peaks rise from the plains.

North along the coast, Cape Cross has a replica of Diogo Cão's cross and a colony of tens of thousands of Cape fur seals. Beyond the Ugab river the Skeleton Coast Park stretches to the Kunene, a coast of fog, gravel plains, shipwrecks and dunes.

Damaraland's highlights lie inland. The Brandberg, Namibia's highest mountain, shelters the "White Lady" painting in the Tsisab ravine at the foot of the mountain, about 30 km from Uis. Twyfelfontein's engravings, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, are shown by local guides, with the Organ Pipes basalt columns, Burnt Mountain and the petrified forest west of Khorixas nearby. Desert elephants move along the dry Huab, Hoanib and Hoarusib riverbeds, and black rhino are tracked on foot in the Palmwag concession. Further north, Opuwo is the gateway to Kaokoland's Himba communities, the Epupa Falls on the Kunene and the remote Marienfluss valley.