Everywhere is nowhere. It doesnt matter if you go left or right, its all the middle of nowhere, such is the wonders of Damaraland and in particular Messum Crater in the Namib, a collapsed super volcano stretching 25km across, its so big that you cant fathom what your seeing unless you look at a aerial photo. It was named by British sea Cpt. William Messum in the 1850s when he came ashore in the Skeleton Coast of Namibia which was referred to at the time by the Portuguese in Angola as "The gates to hell" it was his hopes to go up a river bed he saw and hopefully find water and people should anyone get wrecked along these terrible shores where over 2000 ships have wrecked over the years and a horrid fate awaited any sailor who did not go down with the boat for you would bake by day in the furnace and by night freeze with the cold air from the Belanguila ocean current from Antarctica. As hunger and dehydration and heat stroke and sleep deprivation set in you would soon be followed by jackals and brown hyena watching you, waiting for you to become so weak that they'd eat you alive. It was with this in mind that Cpt William Messum went up the river and was amoung the very first europeans to happen accross the Damara people at Brandberg where the riverbed ended, on the way to his south he saw a range of mountains which he named after himself just as he did the riverbed, in later years it was discovered that those mountains he named from above happened to shape a enormous circle and hence was named a crater, it was many years later when Dr Heno Martin, premiere geologist of Namibia realized that it was no crater at all, but rather a collapsed super volcano. In later years when a discovery was made that mountain ranges here in Africa went on in South America did they realize that Africa and South America were together at a time and was split asunder, the rock from the blast of the messum volano has also been found in South America and hence it is speculated that Messum was responsible for ripping the super continent Gondwana apart. Yet when you drive through messum its a odd looking landscape that looks nothing like a crater, most wouldnt even know they were in it.
(Content courtesy: RoadTripToNamibia)
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* Namibia
* roadtrip
