When the planet is too much, this is the expedition to think about - not to sight game but to experience the bizarre loneliness of one of the world's most strange and picturesque areas. Namibia's Skeleton Coast is a little-explored desert heaven of wide-open places, undeveloped, unpopulated, and far from civilization.

Its name refers to the deceitful, desolate coastline where shipwrecks and whale bones litter the fog-shrouded seashores. The Cape Cross Seal Reserve is a reproduction ground for tens of thousands of Cape fur seals; they lie around on the rocks and coasts, and their blue-eyed pups appear in late November or early December. Light aircraft is the perfect way to visit much of this deserted land, which at times looks like a cruel moonscape, at other times an enormous sea of shifting sand dune mountains, alleged to be the highest on the planet.

This is the Sossusvlei region of the Namib Desert, one of the world's oldest and driest, whose 1,000-foot-high apricot-coloured dunes are fashioned and driven like waves by the sea winds. Particularly wonderful at dawn or dusk when the colours of the dunes change kaleidoscopically, the hugeness of the area is best experienced by climbing a dune and listening to the howl of the sand grains falling over the surface.