Namibia's Skeleton Coast: Dem Bones, Dem Bones, Gonna Walk Around...

Even the bugs amaze. I saw a beetle irrigated by grooves in its back that build up a drop of water from condensed fog. Another fog connoisseur is a plant, the welwitschia mirabilis. Two leather-like, porous leaves turn into a tangled mass, two meters across. Some plants are 2,000 years old. A bit inland, amid canyons and valleys that resemble hard scrabble parts of the American West, are ostrich, jackals, mountain zebra, baboon, and fox.

Desert elephants have been seen venturing to the coast to surf the dunes and create their own symphony. We track elephants on foot - they're always around the bend, judging by fresh elephant droppings, until the sun reflecting in a canyon of clay "castles" beats us back. Our vehicles soon turn back as well, as an unexplored river bed that might leave them stuck amid lion tracks becomes too forbidding near sunset. No tow trucks here.

But the greatest survivors here are the Himba tribe, some of whom reside just outside the park. Scattered across northern Namibia, they comprise less than one percent of the population. They haven't changed their nomadic lifestyle in centuries, raising cattle and living in huts of dung and sand with goat innards drying on the roof for some delicacy I manage to miss.

The women are particularly impressive, wearing only goatskin aprons and jewelry, glowing red from a mixture of ochre, an iron ore, mixed with rancid butter, rubbed daily over every square inch, their braided hair coated with mud and hardened like a helmet. These women work hard while the men count their cattle. Their beauty is not one of desolation, but of robust physical strength and a meticulously tended traditional appearance that, say anthropologists, maintains the manner in which they are valued, as well as a hedge of continuity against the vagaries of less-than-stellar modern life.

It's hard to know what to wish for the Himba. Their refined beauty is well-framed by the harsher beauty behind them. The world is spinning fast, but they have gotten off. No debates over broadband here. But horrors such as the diamond wars farther north in Angola, the heartbreak of AIDS orphans, tribal conflicts, and deprivation magnified by an envy of wealth have missed the Himba in this neck of Namibia. The elements in their neighborhood are so tough that no one hungers for their land — it's safety in lack of numbers.

A drought — the term is relative here — killed enough cattle a couple decades ago to drive some Himba into the towns. They didn't fare well; alcoholism and prostitution were often the byproducts of culture shock. Much farther east, a proposed dam threatens the Himba way of life. But at the Skeleton Coast the bet is that if you drop by in 50 years, or 100, the headman's progeny will still be tending the holy fire, a smoldering log that helps enlist departed paternal ancestors to intercede with their creator. Spartan though the Himba camp is, don't walk on the large, bare expanse between that holy fire at the headman's hut and the corral. You'll disturb a sacred force.