Africa

[Visited: August 2019]

When we leave the main road just north of Cacuaco, a suburb of Luanda, it directly becomes a dirt track. We have read stories from people not finding the right track and getting stuck in the sand, and are happy our driver knows the way. We take a left, and in the distance, we can already see huge ships rising from the sea. We are not approaching a port, but this Praia do Santiago or Praia do Sarico has been dubbed Shipwreck Beach for a reason. It is the resting place of ships and boats which for one reason or another have been discarded. A ship cemetery. When we get off our car, we step into a foggy, humid, and empty beach. The contours of hulls of ocean vessels rise above the sea, and there is a constant sound of waves pounding the rusting carcasses.
Parts of the ships have been taken away, and we can look into them, see staircases, pipes, ropes, the inside of the hulls. But surprisingly, much of the ships is still there, waiting for the elements to take them apart with time, slowly, very slowly. We wait for waves rolling in, and see some crashing hard into the rusting vessels, the spray towering above the huge ships. Some wrecks have their bow cutting into another wreck. We wonder about the story of these ships, but our driver does not know much about them.Some wrecks lie on the sand, some in the surf, some are still further away. With time, the ocean will push them ashore as well, or will make them capsize. There are, in fact, several wrecks lying on their sides. One wreck has a thin, rusting wall left, with holes and cracks, still standing.
We walk until we reach a fence and a military checkpoint, and two soldiers ask for our documents: it is time to turn around. We walk slowly and stop frequently, waiting for waves rolling in and hammering the wrecks, to see the light fog giving the ocean and the ships a mysterious look. We drive a little towards the south, walk through a muddy area, and reach the beach again, where we find more wrecks. One of them is the heavily rusting Karl Marx: this beach is also called Karl Marx beach by some. We could walk for several more kilometres, and see many more wrecks lying in the surf towards the south. It is somehow weird not to see anyone here, no one trying to scrape off metal for sale, trying to look at all the rubbish washed ashore, either from the shipwrecks or the ocean itself, littering the beach. So close to a multi-million-city, yet so abandoned: Shipwreck Beach.

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Shipwreck beach (Angola)

Shipwreck beach > Angola > Africa

[Visited: August 2019]

Around the World in 80 Clicks