Cape Cross Seal Colony Stinks

You can't go anywhere without some guys trying to sell you ugly nuts carved with your name on it or common stones they pick up on the side of the street and pass off for gems.  I took a drive today up the Skeleton Coast to visit the Cape Cross Seal Colony. 

On the way, I stopped to photograph a shipwreck, which is nicely marked by a road sign and a decent path through the dunes to the beach where it rests.  It's a Portuguese fishing trawler that ran aground several years ago and today provides a nice home for Cormorants.

After I parked the car in the dunes, this guy comes out of nowhere to hawk his rubbish.

 He is not really all that nice or polite, but he is very persistent.  I tell him and his four friends I don't want to buy anything, and they then beg for food.  I promise to give them some dryvorst when I get to the car.  They left me alone to photograph the wreck but followed me to the car to demand their food.  I was a bit nervous all alone on the beach with four guys following me to my car but they were only interested in the food and once they got it the scurried off to eat it without even saying "Thank you."  I suppose the thanks is in the nice portrait I took of him.

The drive to Cape Cross took 1.5 hours and it is a drive like any in Namibia, passing through endless miles of barren landscape.

It could be the moon, as the sand is ashen as if it came from deep within the earth spewed out of a volcano.  The Skeleton Coast is like this for hundreds of miles North, and its completely uninhabited except for four small vacation communities, mining outposts, and some tourist spots like Cape Cross. 

Entrance to the park costs N$90, which is about US $10.  Driving in you are greeted by a picnic area a few hundred meters from the seals.  Even here, the stench of rotting seal carcasses is overwhelming.  Jackals and hyenas prey on seal pups and seem to enjoy only eating the entrails, leaving black furry seals half eaten up and down the shoreline.

It is sad and you do feel the tragedy of these young lives cut short by land predators they do not understand.  But then you drive to the colony and the overwhelming stench of these animals grips you.  It is like nothing you have ever experienced.  Imagine tons of sardines digested by half a million seals, excreted in every form on the sand that the same animals lie on and roll around in.  It is a smell that is beyond description and it made me nauseous then and for several hours after.  The smell is still with me even though I have bathed and washed all my clothing and it is five hours since I was on the beach.  I can't smell it.  I remember it.

The seals themselves are not that endearing up close.  They are fat, clumsy, dog-like animals who sleep all day and have little interest in human beings.  In the water they do look athletic and graceful.  On land, its easy to see why Jackals like to eat them.

 We humans walk on a plastic wood board-walk across the dunes and over several hundred seals who cough, belch, fart, and bicker beneath us.  It is beyond disgusting and I can say in all honesty that I have seen as many seals as I ever want to see in my life.  I feel no compunction to love these animals or ever visit one of their colonies again.

On the way home, I tried to escape the remembrance of the stench in the vastness of the landscape and found what I thought was a quiet corner of the beach an hour South of Cape Cross to lay out a blanked and fall asleep.  There were only sea shells and surf fishermen nearby, and the distant drone of cars on the salt road.

But I was awoken by the smell of a rotting seal carcass, because even here, not far from Swakopmund, one can find these animals and their predators. 

You may think me cruel and heartless to feel so little for these "wonderful sea mammals," but I tell you once you have visited one of these places you will not think them so wonderful.