The Journey North

Of the many interesting experiences I’ve had here at Klipwal, I can now add being a truck driver to the list. The mine staff here have been running at full speed to try to build a new plant before Thursday. That’s when yet another potential investor is arriving in Klipwal – in a helicopter – to listen to Lloyd brag and boast about his ‘baby’ (the mine). It’s just speculation on my part, but I’m thinking the guy arriving on Thursday might have even more cash to offer than the other guys judging by his preferred mode of transport. As a result of the flurry of activity at the mine, and with Nick off in Johannesburg buying steel, timber and cable in bulk, I was drafted to be a co-driver for a delivery of carbon to our sister mine TGME (Lloyd owns other mines too) located in Pilgrim’s Rest. I quickly packed an overnight bag on Thursday morning and was teamed up with one of our drivers named Vincent for the 6 hour drive north.

Our first pit stop was only five minutes outside of Klipwal at Vincent’s house. His house was typical of the rural dwellings that dot the countryside around Klipwal, consisting of six or seven small houses and huts clustered around a larger central house. Some were made of concrete and others of mud and stone. He said he grew up in that house and when we dropped by so he could pack his bag, there were three small children playing in the grass next to the two cows that his family owned. Vincent emerged about five minutes later and had changed out of his work overalls into plaid trousers, a Liverpool FC jersey, and a black leather jacket. Ten minutes down the road there was a large market going on with people selling fruit, clothes, and toiletries by the side of the road. Vincent pointed out his mother to me who was sitting selling Avocados and oranges in the market.

After passing through Piet Retief and continuing North, the next major town that we pass is Amsterdam. One of the many towns in South Africa named after a Dutch city, Amsterdam is in no way comparable to its European namesake. The main cross-roads at Amsterdam feature a Shell station, a liquor store, and a mechanics garage. Other than that, some old houses and a few more liquor stores line the main road through the town. It did however offer one thing that Amsterdam, Holland definitely does not have: monkeys. And we would end up passing a lot of monkeys over the next few hundred kilometres. They always seemed to be playing on the roads and evade oncoming traffic just in time before getting hit.

Unfortunately Vincent and I were not like the monkeys when it came to avoiding the Mpumalanga Traffic Police. Over 200 kilometres, Vincent and I ran into 5 traffic stops, which are annoyingly popular in South Africa. The police stand in the middle of the road, wave you to pull over, and then check for your license and if your vehicle is running properly. The first one we hit, they checked Vincent’s license and sent us on our way. The second one, however, resulted in a ticket for an “improperly fastened battery”. And at the fourth stop when they asked for our little reflective triangle thingy and when we couldn’t produce one, they slapped us with another 200-rand ticket. This all seemed very petty and proved to be an enormous waste of time, as we were now behind schedule, but we continued on until we stopped at a gas station in Badplass to switch drivers.

Taking the wheel of the Toyota Hiace, I revved it up to 2^nd gear and roared up the hill at 35 miles per hour. We were carrying nearly a ton of carbon on the back of this small flat bed truck (made to carry 1 ton), so it was very sluggish going up the hills. And up the hills we went until reaching the pass before entering the Barberton gold valley. After dropping down into the large bowl we slowly climbed our way back up to the next pass just south of Nelspruit. Home to the World Cup stadium held up by giraffes, Nelspruit was luckily not full of traffic as it usually is, and we breezed through the town and began the climb into the Transvaal hills. We were entering yet another South African gold country, the eastern Transvaal being home to Pilgrim’s Rest, a classic 1800’s mining town where I first started this whole journey almost two months ago. After finally reaching the sleepy tourist destination at around 4, I took the dirt access road into the valley to the mine there, where a guy named Danny was waiting for the carbon. Expecting another struggle to lift the two 500kg bags of carbon off the truck, I was relieved to see the crane they hired at their plant make quick work of the unloading process. Danny gave me the hotel reservations for the night, and I drove Vincent back to the town for some dinner and drinks.

I went back to Johnny’s Pub where Lloyd and I had a few drinks and talked with some locals back in September. I had a beer, and Vincent stuck with Sprite. The same guy was working behind the bar so I reintroduced myself and we got to talking about South Africa and how I was liking the country. Then he pointed to the flyer on the bar counter: “Thursday, October 28^th, Movie Night at Johnny’s Pub.” The movie was Tombstone, and it came with a two course meal of cornbread and homemade chilli. Perfect. By 6:30 it seemed like at least half the town of Pilgrim’s Rest (pop. 90) descended on Johnny’s, and just like last time they were all extremely friendly and excited to hear about their gold mine starting up again. They started the movie at 7 and I enjoyed the chilli con carne as we watched Wyatt Earp lay down the law in the Wild West. We finally left at around 10 and Vincent drove me up the hill to the Crystal Springs Lodge where Danny had booked us in for the night.

Breakfast was included in our stay there so I took full advantage of that by raiding the cereal and muffins at the continental buffet. That morning we headed back down the steep road overlooking Pilgrim’s Rest to the valley floor and down the dirt road to the mine. It was now my job to sample the tailings dam here, just as I have done at Klipwal, and take that material back to our mine to run in over the James Table. Lloyd arrived later that morning and then assigned me the task of drafting a report outlining the processing potential of the dam there, so I will be busy completing that in time for Mr. Helicopter Bigbucks on Thursday. Soon I finished sampling and Vincent and I were on our way, heading south the way we came.

The drive back was uneventful but beautiful, with amazing views from the summits of the passes looking over miles of the jagged Drakensburg Mountains and the sweeping plains below. Everything was fine until we hit the gauntlet of police traffic stops again. This time I was the driver. They first checked my California driver’s license and while they were a bit confused and then excited, everything checked out. Then they began meticulously checking the truck, asking me to turn the hazard lights on and adjust the mirrors. I felt like I was back at the DMV taking my driving test. When I pressed down on the horn and it didn’t work, we ran into some problems. They also noticed that on one of the tires, one of the nuts was missing. He was ready to ask me to step out of the car and write me a ticket, when I quickly grabbed the two we were given the previous day and showed him. He obviously felt some pity, because he then asked me the question “Can I write you another ticket?” Not really knowing how to respond to being asked this by a cop, I replied after a long pause, “Umm....no, thank you?” And guess what, it worked! First time I’ve talked myself out of ticket.

It was six in the evening when we arrived in Piet Retief for a final fill-up. And as icing on the cake of our wonderful two-day journey, we were given a spectacle at the gas station when a crazy drunk guy stripped down naked and started running around the parking lot. The workers helplessly chased him around until the police showed up (carrying large shot guns), which was our cue to leave. I drove back the hour to Klipwal and dropped Vincent off at his house before collapsing into bed. Truck driving takes a lot out of you.

Stuck in the Mud

I was given the keys to one of the pick-up trucks this morning along with a team of four to help me re-sample the tailings dams at Klipwal. A couple of weeks ago, Lloyd arranged for me to do the exact same thing (http://macsledger.blogspot.com/2010/10/fools-gold.html), so the holes were already dug and I knew exactly how to go about it. I planned for the sampling to be done around 10 after starting digging at 7, and then I could have all of the material over the James table and the pyrite concentrate into the sample bags ready to go by about noon or 1 at the latest. Sometimes, of course, "kuk" happens. There's a new Afrikaans word for you to enjoy.

To recap from a previous post, I was sampling 3 tailings dams, which are basically large piles of fine waste material from the ore that is brought up from underground. Through previous sampling they have established that there is still a fair amount of gold in these tailings, mostly locked up in pyrite crystals. So today I would take a total of 400 kg of tailings material from the three dams and then run this material over the James table to separate out the pyrite into a concentrate that will hopefully be running at up to 80 grams/ton gold. This is economic because of the sheer volume of material in these tailings dams, and it's so easy to get to. Say for instance, that the three tailings dams here contain a combined total of 2 million tons of material, which is not far off the actual amount. When this material is run over the James table, it produces a pyrite concentrate that weighs about 1.2% (conservative estimate) of what you put in. So that gives you 24,000 tons of pyrite concentrate, which will average anywhere from 15-80 g/ton gold. That is what the sampling I am doing will give us an indication of, the grade of the pyrite concentrate. And if we do get up into the 80 g/ton gold range, with gold going at over 43 dollars per gram right now, that can generate some serious money. (WARNING: MATH) For instance, taking the most conservative possible estimate: a 1,000,000 ton dam, with a 1% mass pull, running at 15 grams/ton gold, will produce a revenue of....$6,450,000. Or, for the optimists, 2,000,000 tons of tailings, with a 1.5% mass pull running at 80 g/t will give you...$103,200,000 (!). Obviously the result will be somewhere in the middle, and that is what my sampling will help find out.

So all was normal as Leonard, Phillimon, and I along with two others systematically filled up buckets with the mud and then filled 3 large bags, one for each dam, with the tailings material. Johan, our electrician, was working on some powerlines adjacent to the dams, and was using the pick-up truck as well. With the three full bags ready and waiting at various areas across the dam, I borrowed the truck and drove to the first bag. I backed up to meet the first bag which contained 200kg or 440lbs of the muddy "waste". I had six people on my team now and with me as the seventh, it took all of our strength to lift up the awkward, floppy sample bag into the back of the truck. With that one loaded, they got in the back along with the bag and I pulled away towards the next bag about 100 meters away.

20 meters later, I was sinking. A put my foot down, and experienced that horrible feeling of having your foot on the gas pedal, hearing the wheels spinning ferociously, and the car going absolutely nowhere. I turned off the truck, had everybody get out, and I found a couple of pieces of wood to wedge under the tires of the rear-wheel drive truck. All six of them pushed as I slammed on the gas and tried to get us out of the situation, but after about 5 tries, I needed to explore other options.

I called Thys, Klipwal's mechanic, taxi driver, and all-around vehicle guy. Five minutes later he was hooking up the back of the truck to the old Land Rover that he arrived in. The seven of braced to push the truck, Thys hit the gas on the Rover, and...nothing. In fact there was some movement, unfortunately it was the Land Rover now sinking down into the mud. Now we had two vehicles swallowed by the viscous, soupy clay. Thys cursed a bit in English and Afrikaans and then hopped into the original pick-up that I got stuck. He instructed us to push, and we all followed his order even though both he and I knew I had tried the same thing unsuccessfully 20 minutes prior. Thys rammed down the accelerator, we pushed, and to my surprise the truck lurched forward! That's experience for you. We continued to push as it awkwardly skidded through about 20 meters of mud before hitting a dry patch where he could rest.

What happened next is the reason why I will now carry a camera with me whenever I am at work. I am extremely annoyed I didn't have it with me for this moment. Thys navigated his way to the extreme Southern corner of the tailings damn that we were on, reversing to the very edge. He now had the second bag of material that we loaded onto the back, adding an extra 100 kilos to the weight of the truck. In front of him was 50 meters of dry dirt followed by about 80 meters of mud before he was safe again on the dry north side of the dam. A couple of loud revs of the engine echoed towards us, then, straight out of Back to the Future, Thys gunned it to 88 and screamed through the gauntlet of mud. The truck fish-tailed around a bit but glided beautifully along until finishing safe and sound on the other side. It's unfortunate that today was sunny and stormless; a well-timed bolt of lightning and Thys would have undoubtedly travelled through time.

Attention now turned to the stuck Land Rover. We first relieved the pick-up of the heavy sample bags before Thys drove into position to tow the Rover with the pick-up. I couldn''t help but think of the ridiculousness of the situation. A 10:30 am, the Rover was towing the pick-up. At 10:45, the pick-up was towing the rover. This proved to be even more ineffective, the two-wheel drive pick-up having no chance. And even with us wedging rocks underneath the Rover's tires and Thys gunning the Rover as I tried to tow it with the truck, the Rover just sunk even more. The chassis was on the brink of sinking into the mud, so we had to stop.

I got my team to help me load the three sample bags back into the pick-up, and we drove back to the plant to drop them off, having no choice to abandon the Rover for the time being. After unloading the samples next to the James table and then waiting in the office for about thirty minutes, the Rover's savior arrived in the form of Lloyd's old Land Cruiser. Pietrus had taken it into Piet Retief on business and now we could use the beast to get the Land Rover out of the mud. I went down with Pietrus and Thys in the Cruiser, we hooked it up to the Rover, and Pietrus stepped on the gas. The front of the Cruiser lurched upwards, and then after a couple of seconds, the Rover popped out of it's muddy trenches and rolled forward into the harder dirt.

Thus ended a normal work day at Klipwal. For the record, I am in no way affiliated with Toyota or the Land Cruiser model, but that thing saved the day!

Africa has the best thunderstorms

Saturday turned out to be a fairly typical one of driving to Piet Retief for shopping and coming back and relaxing at Klipwal in the afternoon. That was until another afternoon thunderstorm hit. And this one just didn't want to go away.

At about 4 I was getting a little antsy after reading on the patio in front of my house so I went on a little run. I started down the dirt road towards the 6 level entrance and figured I'd run about 15 minutes downhill and it would take a half an hour or so to run back up. Only 5 minutes into the run though, I had just passed a donkey when I saw an impressive flash of lightning almost directly above me. It seemed to have moved horizontally across the sky, and there was no rain yet to accompany it. Still, that was plenty of a warning for me to immediately turn around and hot-foot it back to the house. I arrived about 10 minutes later, unlocked the door, went inside, and sure enough, there was a boom of thunder followed by heavy rain. Impeccable timing.

Fortunately this storm lasted only about half an hour, and soon it was dry outside again. My neighbor Nick invited me over for a braai so I walked over around 6 and we started a log fire. By 6:15, I was sitting on his patio, looking south over the Pongola River and the rugged terrain of the Ithala game reserve, experiencing without a doubt the most amazing lightning storm I have ever seen. The actual storm at this point was at least 10 or 15 miles away, but the frequency and brightness of the lightning was nothing like anything I've ever seen. Far away on the horizon, jagged bolts tore down from the grey clouds and momentarily lit up the skyline as if it were midday. Sometimes there would be sheet lightning that illuminated the sky for miles on either side of where we were sitting. The visual spectacle was enhanced by the light from the flashes reflecting of the rushing river some 400 meters below. Some of the bolts that struck were so bright that they left that temporarily blinding imprint in your eye, like somebody just shined a flashlight in your face. And this storm was still miles away. The thunder we heard was just a dull, distant roar.

Around 6:45 the charcoal was ready so we put the meat over the BBQ, and still sat watching the distant storm. I realised however, that it definitely was getting a little bit closer. The thunder was definitely louder, with less of a delay from the initial lightning strikes, and the crickets had silenced themselves. Nick was explaining to me earlier, when I was a bit nervous about starting a braai with a lightning storm nearby, that if the crickets are chirping, which they were very loudly and incessantly at the time, it means that there is no rain coming and it should stay dry. With the meat now over the burning embers, we both noticed that the crickets had gone silent. A gust of wind blew very hard, kicking up dust and the smoke from the fire, and before we knew it, some loud, sharp banging noises started to come from behind his house. Confused about what the noise was, I stood in the doorway with my camera, while Nick rushed to take the meat of the braai.

Not 30 seconds later, Nick was safely inside with meat (perfectly cooked), and I figured out what the banging noises were. Those were the hailstones from the front of the storm hitting the metal roof. It had arrived. I soon witnessed another first: the biggest hailstones I've ever scene. Most were easily the size of golf balls and exploded into pieces as the hit the concrete on the patio. After about two minutes of the icy stuff, I was thrown off guard by a lightning strike, this time the kind that is so close it makes a much louder, sharper cracking sound than the normal low thunderous boom. And after that followed what is probably the heaviest rain I have ever witnessed.

An hour earlier, Nick and I stood out on the patio enamoured with the show taking place miles away, with a new lightning strike literally every one to three seconds. Now that was happening right above our heads. There was another close strike and immediately the power went out. Nick got a flashlight and went to the circuit breaker and saw that they had tripped, so we soon were up and running again. I finished my dinner and waited for a small lull in the heavy rain, and ran back the 40 yards to my house at around 8. And the storm rolled on, without seeming to move from Klipwal.

I desperately tried to take photos showing the impressive blasts of lightning, but couldn't even manage to capture one even though the strikes seemed virtually constant and coming from all directions. I ended up getting a few videos captured, and have some serious respect for anyone who has caught lightning on film. Maybe I'm just a crap photographer.

Then, at around 10 o'clock, it happened. Sitting on the couch in my house, I was shaken by the loudest noise I ever heard. An enormous blast of a whip-crack sound exploded into my eardrums, and I thought a tree had fallen on to my roof. It was another lightning strike, and I don't know for sure but it either hit my roof or a tree right next to the house. The blinding flash that accompanied the noise was immediately followed by complete darkness. And then another flash about 4 seconds later. And another, and another. The power was out again, and this time for a lot longer.

I'm glad I like thunderstorms, and I'm glad that my internet here is on cell phone reception, because I just stayed up, accompanied by my flashlight, candle, and Lego man lantern, and talked to some friends online. The constant lightning flashes and the heavy rain lasted a good 5 hours, as the storm finally petered out around 1 in the morning. The next morning the power came on around 8 am, and I learned that there were dozens of transformers in the area that failed, so the surrounding villages for about 40 miles were all without power too. As I type this account on Sunday evening at 5, I can just begin to hear distant rumbles of thunder (which always reminds me of Jurassic Park when they hear the footsteps of the T-rex). Can't wait to see what happens tonight!

Technical Difficulties

In the sense of the mine, not my blog. Klipwal is experiencing some growing pains at the moment which has led to a slightly unusual last couple of days for me. It all started sometime Monday evening when the pump at 7-level seized up because of the lime deposits building up over months of use. This pump takes our natural drinking water source, a fissure about 200 meters below ground, and pumps it up to the surface where it is stored in tanks and distributed amongst the offices and houses. On Tuesday morning, they noticed that the tanks were low so they ordered a new pump that would be delivered and installed the next day.

I was planning on doing my usual underground mapping on Wednesday, but when I got to the truck at 6:10 in the morning, Thys asked if I could help install the new pump, so I took Phillimon and Leonard with me and we went down to 6 level with the pump and a group of other workers. Luckily the rails on 6 level had recently been refurbished so they could place the new pump on a mine cart, or cocopan as they call it here, and wheel it to the ladders down to 7 level. After that, the process got trickier. The pump is extremely heavy, and takes at least 4 if not 6 people to carry it, so lowering it down on the ladders took extreme care. The workers rigged up a rope system and slowly lowered it down the 40 meters to 7 level while I went ahead with Thys down a different set of ladders to get to the old pump and start dismantling it.

The pumping site sits in the far northern nook of 7 level and there is a single fluorescent light creating an eerie glow over the area. The old pump was rigged up on a steel frame and each bolt was painstakingly taken out by Thys and I before the group of us managed to detach the pump from the frame and move it to the side. Eventually the new pump arrived, which was identical to the old one minus the rust and lime deposits. The process was reversed and we bolted the new pump into place, installed new engine belts and eventually tested it out. The pump seemed to hum along nicely and the reservoir of water that had built up behind the adjacent dam was slowly beginning to drain. It was a tedious process that lasted a good 6 hours of hard work underground, and it gave me a good taste of what a mining engineer has to do on a daily basis. I definitely prefer mapping.

Now it was just a matter of the water tanks at the surface refilling so we could have running water again, which we had been without for almost 24 hours. I waited and waited Wednesday night, and no running water came. Thursday morning, same story. Turns out the workers in the plant had inadvertently started using the water from the drinking water tank for the plant processes, which has left us still with no running water. So today I helped the crew at the plant carry pipes and cut pipes and switch on pumps and switch off pumps, hopefully in some way helping the problem. Eventually everything was put in its right place again and the water was filling up the tanks, but we now must wait again for the tank to fill up. As I'm typing up this post at 3 in the afternoon, I'll just check the tap one more time...yep, as I expected, still no water. Fortunately I have a stockpile of full, chilled water bottles in the fridge and some juice to go with that, but it's definitely getting to that point where I could really use a shower.

Our Chief

It is with great regret that I announce the passing of Chief Msibi, who locally governed the immediate area including our property at the mine. I of course knew very little about the local Chief, but two of my co-workers had close family relations with him so the past couple days at work have been more somber than usual. When I was driving back from town yesterday, my truck reached the summit of a small hill in the dirt road to reveal a parade of hundreds of local Zulus marching along the road in remembrance of Chief Msibi. I pulled off to the side of the road and witnessed the crowd slowly pass, some holding hands, others looking down at the dirt. It was quite moving to see the entire community together there respecting their dear Chief who I'm told has ruled this land for over 20 years.

It will be interesting to see in the near future what sort of ceremonies there will be for the funeral. Funerals are enormously important to the Zulu community here. In the small town of Piet Retief alone I've counted three funeral homes. For someone so well-respected, I expect there will be an extraordinary ceremony put together for the Chief. And from the brief accounts I have been given from one of his family members, he definitely deserves it. R.I.P. Chief Msibi.

Rugby and the Beach

Now that I’m fully capable of driving with a manual transmission, I have the freedom to go into town and on various other adventures out of Klipwal as I please. I took advantage of that this weekend first by driving into town for my weekly grocery shopping. With the recent storms and rainfall we have had here the past week, the heavily pot-holed route out to Piet Retief has become considerably worse. With many of the potholes noticeably wider and deeper, the drive to town took an extra 10 or 15 minutes on top of the usual hour it requires. Once I arrived I did my shopping, sent off some letters from the post office, and went to the hardware store to get some yellow spray paint which I so desperately could have done with for mapping underground this past week.

Saturday afternoons this time of year are dominated by Currie Cup Rugby, and this Saturday was the semi-finals of the playoffs. It coincides nicely with the Major League Baseball playoffs, so I’ll use that as an analogy to attempt to give you some sort of an emotional attachment to the rugby playoffs here. If you aren’t a fan of baseball or rugby, I’m sorry. You can skip the next few paragraphs. The first matchup was between the Blue Bulls of Pretoria, the perennial powerhouse with a huge fan base and lots of money to buy good players. Their fans are arrogant and often crass (they’re the ones with the giant blue testicles hanging off the back of their trucks), and no season is a success unless they win the title. They are the New York Yankees. Saturday afternoon’s semi-final pitted the Blue Bulls against the Durban Sharks, an up and coming surprise package that easily took first place in the regular season standings this year. They have very little playoff experience but they had home field advantage and all the talent to get a victory. The Sharks are much like the Texas Rangers.

I walked the five minutes over to Jaco’s house to watch the game. He is a Blue Bulls fan and his wife Ann-Marie is a Sharks supporter, so things were already tense when I arrived. To make matters worse, the game was delayed 30 minutes because of a swarm of bees on the pitch. I kid you not. Finally the match started and the Sharks stunned the Blue Bulls with a try in the opening three minutes. The rest of the match was hard fought but yielded little scoring opportunities as the rain came pouring down in the second half. The Durban Ranger Sharks of Texas eventually prevailed 16-12 over the New York Blue Bull Yanks of Pretoria.

The next semi-final match-up immediately followed and pitted Western Province (from Cape Town) against the Free State Cheetahs. Western Province haven’t been to the final since 2001 and sported an experienced side anchored by national hero and super-quick winger Brian Habana. They are a traditional team with a storied history and play in Cape Town, a picturesque coastal city by the bay. Sounds a bit like the San Francisco Giants to me. The Free State Cheetahs have Orange and white jerseys, play their home games in Bloemfontein, and have a carnivorous mammal as their mascot. Just like the Philadelphia Phillies! Western Province ended up cruising in this semi-final, easily handling the Phillies – I mean the Cheetahs – 31-7. So my bold prediction based on South African rugby results is: There will be a Texas Rangers – SF Giants World Series. You heard it here first.

Enough of the sports then (I like sports), what else happened this weekend? Well I can now knock off another Ocean from my list, because today I drove out east with Nick to St. Lucia and dipped my feet in the Indian Ocean. Considerably warmer than the North Sea, the Indian Ocean was pleasant to wade in but the brownness of the water was slightly ugly to look at. The turbidity of the ocean was no doubt due to the recent storms that have churned up the waters in the area, but we managed to pick a beautiful day to go to the beach. I took the opportunity to do a little sun bathing and go for a nice run along what was a very picturesque beach with soft sand grading into rolling grassy dunes as you went inland. Reading one of the signs, I learned that the sand there was apparently highly enriched in Titanium, which you could see in the form of irregular black streaks of fine sand within the coarser beige material. It was amusing for a geologist. There were also hundreds of little crabs running around (or crab-walking around), but I could annoyingly never get close enough to one for a picture because they would just disappear in one of the thousands of little crab holes dotting the beach.

After the nice time at the beach which reminded me so dearly of West Sands in the auld grey toon, we returned to the tourist village of St. Lucia and I had an awesome seafood platter for lunch that included some Mozambique prawns and an ice cold beer to drink, which I have to say went down like a homesick mole. That’s one of Nick’s sayings and I hear it about five times per day so I had to include it at some point. After that it was back in the truck and Nick drove back the three and a half hours to Klipwal.

Tomorrow I will experience my first full shift underground. The underground shifts here have recently changed, and because there is only one morning shuttle in the Unimog down to the 6-level entrance, I now start work at 6 am (YAY!!!) and I’ll be underground mapping from 7 until 2. Until now I have only been underground about 4 hours at a time at most, so it will be interesting to see whether I enjoy working in the dark for that long a time!

Creepy Crawlies

I have been fine with all the spiders living in my house, but a scorpion hanging out on the curtains above my bed was not something I wanted to see!

Fool's Gold

Lloyd arrived last night and this morning we went out to the tailings dams to do some sampling. The tailings dams are made up of the waste material that is left after the rock we dig up out of the ground is put through the extraction process. The nice thing about our tailings dams is that they actually still have a decent amount of gold in them. So Lloyd had me organise a group of six guys to sample the 3 main tailings dams at the mine. These are fairly large, trapezoidal piles of stratified mud that sit in a small valley on the side of the mountain that the mine is on. The biggest one is about 25 meters high, 60 wide, and 150 long. The smallest one is a quarter of that size.

In the misty, damp drizzle that has now descended on Klipwal just two days after it was 100 degrees here, my team and I sampled a total of 500 kg or about 1,100 pounds of this mud from all across the three tailings dams. It was a great workout carrying buckets full of 20 kg of clay over hundreds of yards, and an extreme test in balance when trying to carry the buckets down the steep slopes of the highest dam.

After the material was loaded into the truck, I drove back to the plant, where it was poured over a James table. A James table is a large sloped table with a constant flow of water over it that separates the gold and heavy metals from the rest of the material. There are parallel ridges and and troughs and the gold is separated out with the help of the vibrating table and gravity. I guess you could just look it up on wikipedia, but in simpler terms, it's basically a high-tech version of panning for gold.

Today, however, we were panning for pyrite. That's right, fools gold! We aren't foolish, of course (I hope), because the majority of the gold in these samples is actually invisible gold, which is locked up inside the pyrite crystals. Lloyd has the technology to get this gold out of the pyrite, hence we will now be taking apart the tailings dams piece by piece and extracting all of the pyrite from it.

One fun part of today was working with my team of local Zulus, which gave me an opportunity to learn more of the language with Philemon and Leonard there acting as interpreters. "laba" means "here" and "nalaba" means "there". I used those words quite often today. Later this afternoon I was back in the office with Leonard and Philemon when Patience, our receptionist came in and began talking to them in Zulu. Leonard started laughing and so did Patience, but Philemon look uninterested. When I asked them what they were laughing about, Philemon came out with a cracker of a line:

"You know all the women, they are always opening their mouths and saying too many things which I do not wish to hear."

That made me laugh. I'm definitely getting to know my co-workers over the past few weeks.

To close on a completely unrelated note, I noticed for the first time today that there is a page I can view which has comprehensive statistics for the people looking at this blog. No personal information is given obviously, but it shows where the hits are coming from, and according to the stats page, I got 11 hits from Japan and 9 from South Korea yesterday. I guess I'm on my way to Asian internet super-stardom.

Gone Fishing

Today after work I went with Hans and Nick to a nearby reservoir for some bass fishing. I haven't been fishing in I would say at least 6 years, and my fish-catching record is poor (at best), so I went in to the fishing expedition with low expectations. My first cast was pretty impressive. The line caught in the reel and the bait flew majestically about 3 feet forward before tangling in a bush. Take two. Unfortunately it ended in a similar result.

Eventually after 5 or 6 tries I relearned the art of casting and I was getting the bait out a good 40 or 50 feet into the water. Soon I even had a nibble! Just as I was getting confident, I reeled in my faux millipede I was using as bait only to find that a large collection of underwater foliage had collected on my hook. I quickly tore off the unwanted plants and re-cast. This was a good one, it sailed further than any of my previous throws. Soon I felt a firm tug on the line and I knew I was getting a bite. The reel started letting some line out so I held firm and quickly pulled the line back in. 5 minutes later I was immersed in the biggest fishing battle of my life, this thing must have been huge because it wouldn't budge out of the water. Finally with one last pull the lure emerged from the lake, bearing the full weight of the magnificent beauty pictured below.

That's right, it was just a big bunch of seaweedy crap. Nay fish. In the end, Hans caught three fish, Nick caught one, and I caught enough greenery to supply an elementary school salad bar. I still had a great time though, and got to enjoy another amazing South African sunset. Check it out:

We drove back home along the dirt road to Klipwal and on the way stopped at a local Zulu bar for some beer for the braai we were about to have. Hans kept one fish to eat for tomorrow evening, while tonight we had lamb on pork chops on the cards. So upon our return, we went to Nick's house, lit a large wooden fire, and began shooting drink cans with the air rifle. Eventually the lead pellets ran out and the meat was finished cooking, and that just about sums up my Monday evening.

A Sunday afternoon...

...spent shooting tangerines with an air rifle. It was pretty fun.

Also, on the drive back from Johanessburg to Klipwal, we passed through a town called Volksrust. Hanging on a fence next to the main intersection was an enormous sign advertising a 6 vs. 6 soccer tournament. I really wanted to enter a team, especially since the sign said that the 1st place team wins a sheep! What if they gave out livestock instead of plastic trophies at youth soccer tournaments? Just a thought.

A Manly Birthday

My 22nd birthday started out with something every guy needs to experience at some point in his life: A South African mining expo. My boss Nick picked me up from Lloyd's mansion and drove me over to the Nasrec exhibition center, which is adjacent to the Soccer City stadium used for the final of the world cup. That brought back good memories, except this time instead of thousands of crazy, colorful, international soccer fans there were thousands of crazy, Afrikaaner, international mining fans. If you like engineering marvels, tires the size of a house, 147 different types of steel cable, flash lights brighter than the sun, overzealous sales people, the shameless use of scantily-clad women to hand out brochures, and free beer, then this was your place.

Nick used to run a small engineering business for a while so he was enamoured with all of the space-age milling equipment and 85-micron processing screens (WOW!), and while a lot of it was cool to look at, I was a bit disappointed with the representation for the geology side of mining at the expo. But if you're shopping around Chinese mining cable dealers, let me know because I have a few good contacts for you.

After the big day of flexing the man muscle at the expo, Nick took me to the local watering hole for a drink with his brother and son, who is 18. The bar was an Irish pub called O'Hagans. Where isn't there an Irish pub!? I enjoyed the drink and got to talking about music and the local social scene in Pretoria and Joburg with Nick's son Jonathan while sipping on my Heineken, you know that famous Irish beer. Seems like everyone is definitely into their house music and the dreaded dub-step here. I'm sorry but if you don't know what dub-step is, please don't bother trying to find out.

Naturally, the next place to go to sustain my testosterone levels was an ice hockey match. Now, I know what you're thinking, ice hockey in South Africa? Funnily enough, Lloyd's entire family are huge ice hockey nuts. Lloyd plays, his daughter plays, his son has even been to Michigan trying to break into the semi-pro leagues there. Tonight was the first game in a round-robin tournament that featured Lloyd's team (he's the coach), led by who else but the coach's son, against a team from Johannesburg. I've been to some NHL games and I have to say, the quality of the play was pretty darn good. There were great goals and some biiiiiiiiig hits, which are always nice to see in a hockey game.

After Lloyd's Jaguars thumped the visiting Scorpions 6-1, we headed across the street to a Spur Steakranch for dinner. I find Spur hilarious, and here is why: Each Spur Steakranch is heavily themed with a Native American motif running throughout the place. Each restaurant is separately named after an old American tribe, like Navajo or Shashone. They take it to the extreme with different little Native American sayings and words of wisdom on all the place mats. And in true South African style, the portions are huge and if you don't want an enormous hunk of meat on your plate you might as well leave. Despite my begging, I was also treated to a classic themed-restaurant birthday song with a sparkler and a balloon. A lot of it was in Sesotho, one of the local dialects, so I couldn't understand it (to be honest I was half-expecting some sort of Native American chant that they forced their employees to learn), but it was a sufficiently rousing and embarrassing spectacle. I enjoyed my chicken quesadillas (ha found something on the menu that wasn't red meat, in your face Spur) and a pint of beer to cap of a very South African and very manly birthday celebration. If only I was back at the mine, I could go off-roading while shooting a crocodile with a shot-gun (JOKE!).

Lightning Storm

I'm currently relaxing in the comfort of Lloyd's luxurious home in Pretoria, experiencing the 'civilized' life for the first time in a month. Tomorrow I'll be visiting Genalysis, a geological laboratory service in Johannesburg, so I'll probably get to play with expensive lasers and things like that.

With the aid of faster internet, I have uploaded this video for your enjoyment of a nice little lightning strike I caught on camera the other night. It was taken from the doorstep of my house, looking east to the nearby hill that houses the mine's armoury on top of it. As we left Klipwal early this morning, a larger thunderstorm was brewing and we were hit with the first big rain of the season. News back from the mine is that all the power is out at the moment, so it looks like we left just in time!

Weekend Pics

Nick and a security guard walking towards the 6 level adit

The Land Rover parked near 6 level with a large pump in the background. The mine is currently flooded from 12 level down to 15 level, so a series of pumps are used to minimize the flooding and eventually reverse it.

Off-roading in the company car

Weekend Fun

I’m happy to report that I accomplished a lot more this weekend than I did the last; not being cooped up in bed with a fever certainly helped. I had a nice sleep-in on Saturday morning and after lunch went over to Jaco’s house to watch some rugby. Jaco is the main technician at the mine and is about 30 years old. He stays with his wife Ann Marie and their two pit bulls Spotty and Roxy. He invited me over for some Currie Cup rugby action, and I can’t say no to sports so I went.

The Currie Cup is the South African club rugby league and October is the last month, so matches are pretty tense these days. The Blue Bulls of Pretoria seem to be the Yankees or Manchester United of Currie Cup rugby, with rampant bandwagon supporters from all across the country. The trademark of the diehard Blue Bulls fans is to hang a massive pair of blue plastic testicles from the back of presumably your truck or car. I can’t tell you how many of these things I’ve seen on the main roads, lovely to follow behind. Many of the staff here support the Blue Bulls, with their main rivals these days being the Sharks from Durban and the Free State Cheetahs. Don’t root for Leopards, they suck this year.

I enjoyed watching the Blue Bulls narrowly beat Western Province with Jaco and Ann Marie, and soon realised that they had quite the satellite TV package. There are four separate channels dedicated to soccer here, and they even had the American ESPN! That got me pretty excited, but what really impressed was when Jaco showed me his custom sound system he has accumulated. Okay, I honestly am not a huge fan or aficionado of enormous stereo systems, but Jaco seemed excited to show me (he’s dedicated an entire room to it) so let him show me.

I soon realised, as my ears began to bleed from the ridiculous volume levels, that this was a great opportunity to get a taste of the Afrikaans music culture. So, taking from Jaco and bit of other music I’ve heard people listening to, it seems that they are very into their mash-up, rave-y, dance music here. 80’s music is big, classic rock, and country. And if you’re looking for a new pop sensation, look no further than Kurt Darren. YouTube him, he’s a stud. His song “Kaptein” is kind of like an Afrikaans youth anthem. While he was on the computer he also showed me pictures of his totalled truck from an accident they were in. Drunk driving is a pretty big problem in general in South Africa, and Jaco admitted that both he and his wife were drunk and that’s what caused the accident. It’s strange how nonchalantly drunk driving treated over here compared to the US or the UK.

After the afternoon of getting to know Jaco and Ann Marie, we headed across the road to Thys’ house for what else, an enormous braai. This time on the menu were t-bone steaks and of course, bourevors, the ubiquitous South African sausage. It was my first time in Thys’ house, which was filled with model cars that seemed to take up every horizontal surface in the place, as well as a big sound system (not quite as impressive as Jaco’s). Thys showed me his concertina accordions and played along to a few songs he had on CD, turns out he’s pretty good!

For the third night in a row I stuffed myself with red meat and potato salad. It’s incredible how much food they eat here, with the braai being the centrepiece of almost every evening gathering. Anyway, with a fully belly we talked around the fire for a few hours, mostly attempting to teach me more Afrikaans, before we all retired after the firewood ran out. Jaco, being the generous guy he is, offered for me to crash at his place. This turned out to be very fruitful, for Stanford football was playing Oregon on ESPN, which Jaco had on satellite. The game started at 2 am and I stayed up to watch the entire thing; unfortunately Stanford lost and I couldn’t find any of the family in the stands on TV. I walked home at 5:30 in the morning as the sun was rising, slightly disappointed by Stanford’s loss, but enjoying the peacefulness and stillness of early Sunday morning at Klipwal.

After a much needed sleep, I got a call from Nick in the early afternoon wondering if I wanted to take the old Land Rover out for a spin. I jumped all over this and we took it out first to the slimes dam, which is a large, dusty expanse of perfectly flat land made up of the waste material from the mine. I drove around for a while in circles there, getting used to the clutch and the handling of the big 4x4. Soon I was ready to take it down the steep hill to the 6 level entrance, and I have to say it was a lot of fun. Not a bad way to learn how to drive a stick-shift. As I drove the Rover back up the hill to the house, a thunderstorm began which I am currently enjoying watching from my front porch as I type this up.

October Heat

Happy October! The month that usually ushers in the colder, windier weather that I’ve grown accustomed to in Scotland is of course a little bit different here in South Africa. With summer coming in a couple of months, today marked my first day at Klipwal of 100-degree weather. This is about the time the rains should be moving in as well, although they have had a very dry winter here and the talk seems to be that the rain won’t arrive until November this year. Apparently they get some pretty amazing thunderstorms in these parts so I’m very much looking forward to seeing those. So far there has only been a few dry lightning storms at night, which can be pretty dangerous with the windy, dry weather conditions here.

With the potential investors busy being shown around the plant this morning, I took some time in the survey office to organize some of their old maps before joining Lloyd and his gang in going to Kortnek. It has become quite a popular destination for me over the past couple weeks, and there is definitely something very intriguing to me about the wildness of the whole place. Riding in the way back of Lloyd’s packed Land Cruiser, I could read the temperature level as 42 for outside, about 107 degrees Fahrenheit. Needless to say it was a scorcher, and it’s only spring for them here. It was definitely taking its toll on the normally tireless artisanal miners at Kortnek. Most were sleeping under the shade of their makeshift camps or even at the entrance of the adit, as we found a few guys fast asleep as we poked our heads in.

One thing that caught my eye was an enormous dead lizard, and maybe somebody reading this can tell me what kind it is, but it was fairly startling seeing right on the path. It was about 3 feet long from head to tail and as you can see in the picture, it had a big piece of flesh missing from its body. Lloyd reckoned they probably whacked it with a shovel and were leaving it to dry a bit in the sun before cooking it for dinner. After they chatted for a while and we looked around at a lot of the holes being dug at the site, it was decided that the immediate area would need to be mapped to get the precise geometries of the ore bodies that they are mining there. That’s where I come in, so I’m sure I’ll continue my visits to Kortnek in the near future.

This weekend I’ll be driving the old Land Rover around the mine on Saturday and might pop into Piet Retief for some foodstuffs. Fishing down at the Pongola River is still on the list of things to do as well as getting out to the coast, seeing the animals at the nearby game reserve, and playing more soccer, but at the moment I’m happy relaxing in the shade. Meanwhile, I need to prepare for another evening of copious amounts of food and alcohol, as it’s the shareholders’ last evening on the mine before they drive out tomorrow and eventually fly back to Australia. Have a great weekend!