"DON'T EXPECT TRANQUILLITY ON THIS NEXT STRETCH," says Schoeman as he whisks my backpack from Wolwedans' dirt runway into the plane's small cargo area. "No more sitting around."

No one knows the Skeleton Coast better than the Schoeman clan. Louw Schoeman, a lawyer who moved his family to Windhoek from South Africa in 1958, discovered the scraggly

It's a lonely, storm-scoured place, and for a few brief moments we seem cut off from everything. Which is exactly why I've come: Unlike the castaways before me, looking for any possible way out, I'm here to purposefully maroon myself.

seaboard and interior deserts through his clients' interests in prospecting; he later helped win park designation for the region. When the elder Schoeman passed away, in 1993, his five children, including Bertus, the oldest, continued operating their father's exclusive flights. There's no better way to see this stretch of isolated coast than on one of the Schoemans' trips, which visit sites few others know about (discovered over years of summer vacations) and overnights at long-established family camps (now turned into posh lodges).

The Skeleton Coast's landscape of burnished dunes and capricious shoreline is especially breathtaking from the air. In our first hour, we fly over Sossusvlei; from above, this collection of some of the world's largest sand dunes (more than 1,000 feet tall) looks like a giant swatch of swirled velvet. After the dunes we slip lower, not even 300 feet off the ground, where it's easy to spy colonies of seals wallowing on the shore and a thousand-strong flock of iridescent pink pelicans, which startle into flight at the clatter of the engine.

"How about a picnic on the beach?" Schoeman suggests, tipping the plane gently toward a stony stretch of windswept coast. I'm amazed he can land on such rough terrain, and I ask whether he's allowed to touch down wherever he likes. "No, not really," he says, bringing the plane in gently. "But anyway, I like to."

The beach we've landed on—site of the Toscanini Diamond Mine, last active in 1968—is littered with remnants of the past. A rotting longboat serves as a makeshift den for a family of jackals, and two rusting cast-iron vehicles with spoked wheels protrude from sand drifts. Up the beach, an arching whalebone—picked clean by animals—gleams white against the dark sea. The Skeleton Coast takes its name from remains like these: the shipwrecks, derelict settlements, and carcasses scattered along the coastline. Over the years, dozens of ships and planes have been lost on these shores, driven off course by the furious Benguela Current churning up from the south and stymied by dense sea fog and shifting shoals. It's a lonely, storm-scoured place, and for a few moments we seem cut off from everything. Which is exactly why I've come: Unlike the castaways before me, looking for any possible way out, I'm here to purposefully maroon myself. As I listen to the waves chip away at the shore, I feel tiny and distant and completely content.

After we wander the beach, Schoeman lays out sandwich fixings for lunch—including kudu carpaccio. I stuff a slice of smoked antelope into my mouth and taste it melting on my tongue. It's rich and tangy and slightly gamier than oryx.

We make our way up the coast, then touch down in wild isolation. At Kuidas Camp, Schoeman leads us on a hike into the stony red hills to show us the rock paintings he and his brother André found when they played here as children. Farther north, at Rocky Point, he recounts stories from the day his family first visited the beach and found a littering of broken porcelain, which they later discovered was the remains of a 17th-century galleon shipwreck. Schoeman tells the stories quietly, as if he's confiding in us. This may be a guided safari, but these insights make it feel like a trip with an old friend on his bygone stomping ground.

At the Kunene River, just across the border from Angola, we take a waiting Land Rover over a long, gentle grade of dunes into the Hartmann Valley, a vast, sandy, mountain-ringed basin named for German geologist Georg Hartmann, who spent six years surveying the region in the late 1800s. More than once, Hartmann and his team became stranded and nearly succumbed to these bleak surrounds. Partway up the slope, Schoeman cuts the engine and we sit in silence for a few moments. Like everywhere on the Skeleton Coast, the spot is empty, remote, inaccessible, and much like the frontier it was a century ago. This is one of the few places in the world where you can still experience land like this. "Can you imagine being stranded here back then?" Bertus asks. "No food, no water, no shelter from the harsh sun. Just imagine it."