The
reason we had had such a long drive yesterday was to get us to
Kimberley, home of the De Beers Diamond Company. There is a small
museum here with replica buildings of the mining town as it was in
the early days, views down into the Big Hole and you can also get
underground tours of the mine and tours of the treatment works. Or
at least that’s what it says in Lonely Planet.
We were up early so that we could make it for the underground
tour at 7:45am. We made our way out to the Big Hole and asked at the
ticket office about the underground tours. The chap behind the
counter seemed clueless so bargaining that we had come to the wrong
place we headed back tot eh car as time was running out to get to
the right place before the tour started. In the car park I stopped a
hopeful looking man and asked him if he knew about the tours. It
turned out that he was the manager of the mines area so a good
person to ask. Unfortunately though the mine closed down six months
ago so there are no longer any tours!
He did confirm though that we could still go and see the Big
Hole and see part of the museum which was behind us. The museum
though is currently a building site and you can’t get around all of
it. It was really frustrating for us because we’d taken a long
detour to get here and pretty much everything we wanted to see was
either closed or off limits. Nevertheless we decided to make the
best of it and headed for the building site, sorry the museum.
Lonely Planet says that the museum has 48 buildings, some
original and some copies of originals. The idea is to create the
look and feel of Kimberley as it was in the 1880’s. They must now be
upgrading and extending the museum as lots of new buildings are
being built to the right of where the old village is. We could only
really get a glimpse through a barrier at most of the buildings.
There is chapel, a bar, the mine manager’s house and a variety of
different shops and work buildings.
Compared to the diamond mine town of Kolmanskop in Namibia,
which was founded in the early 1900’s, the mine manager’s house was
a very modest affair. It was a one story building with a main living
room, two bedrooms off to the side and a small kitchen at the back.
It probably would have fitted into its Kolmanskop counterpart five
or six times over. We were able to see into one of the small rows of
shops here. There was a fancy goods store with an interesting
selection of undergarments on display. Next door a musical shop had
superb keyboards and next to that was the place to go if you wanted
to buy your own hand rolled cigarettes. The pawnbrokers around the
corner had quite a selection of bits and pieces once treasured
items.
The rest of the village is now a building site and we couldn’t
get in to see it. It would be interesting to come back and see it
when it is finished off. Hopefully they will have character actors
working here to bring it to life and to give people more of a feel
for what life was like in those times. Behind the village is the Big
Hole, the largest mine hole in the world that has been dug entirely
by human hands. It is absolutely massive and incredible to believe
that it was created without machines.
An enclosed walkway takes to you to a point where you can look
down into the hole. It is a bit like a volcanic crater with sloping
side leading down to a vertical shaft. The mine is 1,097m deep in
total. Open cast mining took place to a depth of 240m, the rest
being underground. In total 22,500,000 tons of land were excavated
to extract 2,722kg, or 14,504,566 carats, of diamonds, a huge amount
of earth to shift. The mine closed down in 1914 as it was no longer
economically viable and today the hole has 41m of water in it
creating a huge pond 174m down from the surface of the hole.
The Big Hole, incredible to think this is entirely man-made!
It is a staggering sight to see, even more so when you try to
picture what it was actually like to be there and to work there. The
hole is slap bang in the middle of Kimberley and would no doubt have
been the hub of activity in the town. There must have been an
endless stream of mule carts transporting earth, stones and rocks up
to the surface to the filtering bays. Conditions must have been
extremely basic and pretty grim.
Beyond the observation point there are a few tin huts set up
to give you a feel of what it was like for the miners. One was about
the size of our garden shed. Inside it was lined with cardboard, no
doubt acting as a layer of insulation. There was a simple metal
framed bed, a tiny wooden table and a three legged stool inside and
that was it. It was incredibly simple. One of the old mine shaft
pulleys still stands looking graceful and sleepy and as if it is
about to be incorporated into one of the new buildings going up.
As well as looking around the museum and at the Big Hole you
can have a go at a diamond dig. For R5 you can buy a bucket that you
fill with washed stones and pebbles, amongst which you will
hopefully find a bit of plastic the size of a large diamond with a
coloured blob inside. If you find one, the colour determines what
type of a prize you win and they are all pretty tacky like the stuff
you get at fairgrounds. If though you find a bit of plastic with two
spots of colour inside you win a De Beers diamond.
We got our bucket of pebbles and spent the next ten minutes or
so sifting through it with fingers crossed but, in the spirit of the
day so far we didn’t get a single bit of plastic in our bucket. It
was a very boring process and must have been mind numbing and back
breaking work for the people who worked here day in day out hoping
to make their fortune. It was a very different process to Namibia
where people just lay down on their tummies on the desert and picked
the diamonds up off the sand.
We had a quick look in the gift shop surprised that it wasn’t
full of diamonds set in different bits of jewellery. They did have a
few that you could buy in a cheap plastic box with a De Beers wax
seal but we resisted the temptation. It would probably end up
falling out of our packs one day and we’d both be a bit miffed if we
lost it. Besides which the ones we could afford were tiny and the
ones I could have been happy with were a mere £20,000 each!
By 9:15am we were back at our “hotel”. We’d expected to have a
pretty full day of sightseeing but having seen what there is to see
we decided to head south today rather than just killing time in
Kimberley. Although it seems like a pleasant enough town there is
really no reason for us to stay here any more. We packed up the car
and were on the road just after 10:00am.
Our route down to the coast took us through the Karoo. People
we’ve met here told us that it was a very different landscape in
South Africa and something well worth seeing. They are right and we
would probably marvelled at it more if it hadn’t been very similar
to what we had spent the best part of three weeks driving through in
Namibia. We were back to very wide open plains with low scrub style
vegetation growing on what looks like very sandy soil. Even the
rivers here are pretty much all dried up, again like Namibia.
We passed through a couple of hundred kilometres of desert
style landscape grateful that unlike Namibia the roads had been
tarmaced and were in good condition. We knew we wouldn’t make it all
the way to the coast today and we planned to stop just outside
Beaufort West overnight. We pulled into the town which was again a
mix of old colonial South Africa mixed with the new and less
endearing South Africa. There were few white people around and I
could sense eyes following me as I made my way into the supermarket.
It was a pretty odd feeling.
Restocked, we headed out of town and found the Teri-Moja Game
Lodge, our home for the night. You could barely see it from the main
road. There is a main house and then six or seven small thatched
cabins built on a stretch of land in the middle of the desert. We
had a friendly welcome from the owner and her dogs and soon settled
in for the night. There was a large kitchen/lounge area with a
double bedroom and a separate bathroom. A mezzanine floor was home
to two single beds and the settee also looked like it would fold
down into a double bed. It was very comfortable for two, would be OK
for four but I think six would be a bit of a tight fit. Outside we
had a small patio with our own braai area and views out over
the surrounding desert. What it didn’t have though were all the
facilities listed in the AA guide we had picked it from.
Inquisitive ostrich, we named her Olivia
The wind had picked up during the day and a strong breeze was
blowing outside. We were sheltering inside writing our diaries and I
looked up to see and ostrich ambling about on the lawn outside. Stef
grabbed his camera to take some photos and we then had an
entertaining ten minutes or so. It’s hard to say who was more
curious about whom. We were certainly interested in close ups of the
ostrich but she also seemed very curious about us. From the ground
to the top of the wall around our patio must have been at least
seven or eight feet but she could still pop her head over the top to
have a look.
One of the people who runs the lodge was walking past our
cabin at the time and he confirmed that they have about thirteen
wild ostriches on their land. The females and larger than the males
and this one sounds like it is quite a frequent visitor. We have
seen them from the road but had never realised how big they actually
were. Its feet are huge and very solid looking and you certainly
wouldn’t want to get kicked by one. The chap from the lodge said it
was OK to feed it bread or dry biscuits so I went and got a slice of
bread. This gave us a renewed interest factor and as I tore a chunk
off the ostrich went into hyper drive action mode and almost got my
fingers too!
With a clear night sky all around us we donned our fleeces to
keep warm in the wind and had a superb braai dinner outside
watching the stars. We had music playing in the background, too much
to eat and far too much red wine to drink but it was a very pleasant
evening all the same.
