issue 4 digital copy

Heritage Travel
town and everything around it for hundreds of kilometres would of
course have been obliterated in an instant!
Site of the ancient Mupungubwe Kingdom where the gold rhico icon was discovered / Karel Gallas-
Shutterstock.com
lookout platforms have been created from where visitors can view
key points of the kingdom.
The area now falls within
the Mapungubwe National
Park administered by
SANParks, which with the
Tuli Block in Botswana
and the Tuli Safari area in Zimbabwe, forms part of the Limpopo-
Shashe Transfrontier Conservation Area, now officially known as
Greater Mapungubwe Transfrontier Conservation Area. The park
is home to most of the larger and smaller game found in Southern
Africa.
To see it clearly, you would have to travel to outer space. From
there one can see the interrupted line circle, 300km in diameter,
clearly marking the extent of the original crater. It is formed by a
partial ring of hills 70km in diameter created by the rebound of
rock below the impact site after the collision. The Vredefort Dome,
or crater, is also the largest verified impact crater on Earth, but the
crater itself has long since eroded away. The asteroid, or bolide (an
extremely bright meteor that often explodes in the atmosphere
and looks like a fireball) is estimated to have been one of the
largest ever to strike Earth, at least since the Hadean Eon some
four billion years ago.
Facilities include overnight camps with self-catering units, a
restaurant, curios shop and museum. All Mapungubwe’s camps are
accessible by normal sedan vehicles, but it is advisable to have a
4x4 or high clearance vehicle to better enjoy drives inside the park.
There are also a number of eco-trails for which a 4x4 is required.
Vredefort Dome
Perhaps one of the most unnoticeable – to the naked eye - of
South Africa’s eight heritage wonders, yet one that speaks volumes
about Earth’s sometimes precarious existence among its varied
neighbours in space, is to be found in the Free State.
Vaal River at Parys, within the Vredefort Crater / Jan-Nor Photography - Shutterstock.com
It is the second-oldest known crater on Earth. Compared, however,
to the Suavjärvi Crater in Russia, it is a spring chicken, being just
less than 300-million years younger than its Russian cousin. The
dome visible in the centre of the crater was originally thought to
have been formed by a volcanic explosion, but in the mid-1990s,
shatter cones were discovered in the bed of the nearby Vaal River,
providing evidence that exposed it as the site of a huge bolide
impact.
Richtersveld
Listed as the Richtersveld Cultural and Botanical Landscape in the
UNESCO list of heritage sites, the Richtersveld is a mountainous
desert landscape characterised by rugged kloofs (valleys) and
high mountains, situated in northern Namaqualand in the north-
Attack of an asteroid on the Earth - furnished by NASA - Shutterstock.com
The Orange River cuts through the Richtersveld
Wynand Stolp - Shutterstock.com
Called the Vredefort Dome, and added to the UNESCO World
Heritage Sites list in 2005, it represents a 300km-wide impact
crater where one of the largest asteroids ever struck the Earth
2.020-billion years ago. Today, the small farming town of Vredefort
with its 3,000 residents, sits slap bang on the dome in the centre of
the crater. Had they been there over 2-billion years ago, the entire