a gold mine , a museum, a game reserve and a theme park ( South Africa)

Well, that pretty much sums up, what all i did over the weekend in south africa Am definitely not wasting my weekends in South Africa any more . Am watching lot less TV and exploring more of the country. My first weekend in S.A , was wasted, all i did was a brief half day trip to pretoria ,which is just next door to joburg anyway .The recent weekend was better , i covered gold mines,apartheid museum ,pilansberg national park and sun city.I wish i had one more weekend and i could have finished capetown as well,and one more weekend for kruger natl park,and maybe one more weekend for durban,and one more....... .The list of must-do in south africa is just too long, so i guess there is no point in being greedy :(

I kicked off saturday with a visit to a gold mine near joburg , called the gold reef city.This one gold mine , allows tourists to go underground in the shaft and see how they dig out gold and the entire process. The gold reef city is a gold mine cum theme park with some amazing rides .I did'nt have time for the rides though. I went there for the gold !. Gold mines are like any other underground mines - shafts,huge pumps pumping out water, safety headgear,head lamps , etc etc. Except that they run very very deep when compared to other mines. Tourists are taken only half km down the shaft. That is still very deep enough, esp could be scary if you are claustrophobic. But then , if i tell any gold miner that i went down some half a km down ,he will laugh at me , as some of the gold mines run as deep as 4 kms into earth.

They also show you the casting of gold into 12 kg blocks which are sent to bullion markets around the world.The oven used to prepare the gold blocks is fired upto 1000 degrees and the molten liquid gold is cooled into gold bars. Obviously they have very elaborate security before you go onto that zone to watch the process like metal detectors ,bags and body search etc,etc.They have a small sign which says"Number of attempts made to steal gold from this mine since 1980 : - 36050 "Another interesting thing is ,they have an open challenge , which is, if you can lift a 12 kg gold bar without turning or or twisting , using only two of your fingers of one hand ,the gold is all yours .Obviously, it is humanly impossible !It is amazing that a tonne of rock will yield just about 2 to 3 grams of gold and of course whole range of other minerals like platinum,uranium . Johannesburg is also called igoli or egoli which means the gold city in afrikaans ( the local dialect of south africa, basically ,80 % dutch and rest of it is kitchdi of french ,english and zulu).

The afternoon , i visited the aparthied (or is it apartheid) museum which sits just next to gold reef city.I was planning on 1 hour stop there but i ended up spending close to 4 hours in the museum.The museum is not a museum in a tradiional sense,it is more like a modern display .The museum gives you glimpses of life during apartheid time ,the history of white and other settlers in south africa,anglo-boer wars of the early 20 th century ,large screen videos and huge black and white pics of life from 20's till 90's ,the first televised interview of mandela,info on the various dozens of laws during the days,some portions on nelson mandela and then other leaders who were assasinated in 80's . As the first thing that comes to our mind about South Africa is nelson mandela.

Some facts that the outside world knows very little about apartheid,is that there were thousands of people and dozens of leaders who sacrificed their livers for the cause,including many south african whites .One thing i didn't know before the visit was that , India was the first country to impose a trade embargo on south africa back in 60's and the rest of the world incl britain,america joined only in 80's, esp brits had their business interests in south africa and they were not willing to let go in hte beginning .Atleast by the beginning of 90's most of the countries had cut off ties with S.A. There was one section of the museum housing lots of old anti-aprtheid posters ,one of them says "You want to play cricket with South Africa ,you should watch their national sport of apartheid". There is a room dedicated to cartoons and some of the cartoons were really funny. One says "the following is the list of whites who did not benefit because of apartheid ...." (and the list is empty)

There are also small portions dedicated to Gandhi's struggle for south african indians,passive resistance and on the two decades he spent here .There was a recent TV program by SABC TV on 100 great south african leaders chosen by south african viewers and there is a huge controversy on why gandhi was chosen in the list ,as some argue he was not south african and some suggesting that he worked only for the upliftment of south african indians and some even go to the extent of saying that, he himself was prejudiced against blacks , because he did nothing for their cause.

If one reads his autobiography ,Gandhi himself mentions in one of the chapters , "I will always be a south african indian .." Anyway,one can go on and on for ages discussing aprtheid .The good thing is south africans are putting their past behind and atleast all the south africans that i met ,so far, are very friendly.They call themselves "the rainbow nation..!"which is quite true as South Africa is one of the most multi-racial nations in the world.You can see chinese,dutch,blacks,indians,colored,malays,brits etc etc.

Sunday , was for the pilanesberg national game park with a brief stopping at sun city .

Our stop at sun city was very brief ,more like, been there done that kind of thing .Sun city or some call it " the sin city" is a huge complex built next to pilansberg natl. park and houses gambling dens,casinos,two beautiful golf courses, couple of 5* and one 6 * hotels,a huge artificial theme park called "valley of the waves".You need a one long good weekend to explore sun city.Pilansberg is ,relatively, a new wild life reserve on national park , built in the 80's and what was mostly farm land (The Bophutatswana tribe owned the land along with some farmers back then ) was converted into a game park,SA govt brought in some 7000 different animals ,birds etc from different parts of southern africa and relased them into the park .Some say it was the largest such game stocking project in the known history of mankind. The project was, aptly,called "operation genesis " and was started in 1979 . After a period of 25 years,now ,pilansberg looks like any other wild reserve in africa.The best thing about the park is, it is two hours drive from sandton , where i was staying.The park ,interestingly,never had predators till the early 90's. and thats when they introduced the cats . They have the usual elephants,zebras,wilder beasts,antelopes,wild buffaloes,cheetahs,desert lions ( from namibia) ,rhinos etc etc.

You can see lots of africa first timer tourists here ,excited at the sight of a zebra or a springbuck. I was probably behaving like them on my first game drive last year in kenya.But at time it is bit irritating ,they want to stop at every stupid animal ,take pics after pics and after some time they see the same animal from the other side and again they are back to taking pics.Now, it was getting dark and all we were seeing were zebras and buffaloes, then the guide showed us some antelope and told us that was the "pamba" or whatever ,i told him ,"enough of pamba , show us the simba" .Luckily we did get to spot the desert lions which was the best part of the day for me atleast , we actually saw the desert lions and it's cubs feeding on a zebra .We also got to see wild dogs (from a distance) as i did'nt see wild dogs before.

Geologically speaking , Pilansberg is inside a volcanic crater . As we know, a volcano typically has to erupt. Now, this didn't happen here,2 billion years ago(give or take a few million) . The magna cooled under the ground before it erupted, later the centre collapsed forming the centre of the volcano, now called the Mankwe dam. 300 million years later there was actually a bit of volcanic activity to the side of the centre. Then with millions of years of erosion, the hard rock stayed behind forming the crater. Pilanesberg is the best preserved alkaline volcanic crater (!!!) by far(other two in siberia and greenland) and also most accesible.I hope the guide was telling us some facts and not some horse-shit geology. Geology is too boring for me to cross verify his claims.

Anyway, i guess i had enough of game drives in africa and if ever do another game drive ,it will be a self drive.I know the african bush a lot better ,atleast i can tell the diff between a waterbuck and an eland !. (can you??)