Bill Poole's Trip to the
Republic of South Africa
 Native dancers at Gold Reef City
Day 22
Friday, 20-Nov-98
 
I wanted to go to a place called Gold Reef City. It is built around a no-longer-in-use gold mine and incorporates and mining museum and a bunch of disney-land like shops and things.

Since it was friday and most of my friends would be working, I went with the two unattached ladies from the Kruger tour, this was especially convenient since one of them had her company's rental car!

We watched them pour a bar of molten gold, and got to handle a $100,000 bar of gold. There were native dancers giving a variety of performances, including a dance form developed by miners wearing rubber boots.

We put on hard hats, lights and went down to level 5, 226m down, and went on a tour of the mine shafts. 

The winch workings were accessible too, there was a HUGE drum of 2" dia cable for the elevator, only 11 turns were needed for 226m. Apparently the mine has 46 vertical shafts and only 12 go to the surface and everyone has a similar elevator winch. it goes 5000m deep, that's 3 miles!

We walked around the shops, ate lunch, one of the ladies and I went on a water ride (she panicked and wanted to get off midway!)
 
 


Back to the index page
To next day
To previous day
last modified by Bill Poole on 30-May-99, ©.
back to Bill's homepage.
E-mail me if you are so inclined: bill@poole.com
During this trip, (and future trips) I was (will be) available at: bill_poole@yahoo.com