Traveling Geeks

[Video] TauTona Gold Mine

Another video from our bloggers’ trip to South Africa.

In March 1886, nearly forty years after the California Gold Rush, legend has it that Australian gold miner George Harrison stumbled across a rocky outcrop of gold in what was then the Zuid Afrikaanse Republiek. Says Wikipedia: “Ironically, Harrison is believed to have sold his claim for less than 10 Pounds before leaving the area, and he was never heard from again.”

That 10-pound claim soon transformed into a mining village called Ferreira’s Camp, which today we call Johannesburg.

The above-earth portion of the gold reef (’rand’ in Afrikaans, for which the South African currency was named after) discovered by Harrison has since become the most profitable source of gold ever found on earth. 40% of all gold mined on earth comes from this single reef.

And, as we discovered 3.5 kilometers below ground on our tour of the TauTona gold mine, that gold reef continues pretty far underground. Here’s a video of our tour:

The mine, in fact, is so deep that were it not for the ice cold air conditioning pumped down from above, the temperature would be around 55°C. When electricity outages hit South Africa last year the mine was forced to close down for nearly a week.

I was impressed by the obsessive focus on safety throughout the mine. Still, as John noted even before our trip, being a miner at TauTona remains a dangerous affair. (More than four people die in South African gold mines per week.) During the introductory presentation at the mine we were shown a graph of TauTona’s improving safety record over the past ten years. There was, however, a slight increase in deaths last year. A new part of the mine vulnerable to seismic activity was causing a flurry of ground fall and resulting deaths. The mine executives decided to cease mining there once the death rate reached a certain threshold. Still, I could picture in my mind someone coldly calculating the potential financial profits in one column and the loss of human life in the other.

We were told that, depending on the price of gold over the next couple years, AngloGold Ashanti plans on digging the TauTona Gold Mine even deeper – perhaps all the way to five kilometers beneath earth. The funny thing about economic crises is that they tend to be good for gold mines as investors hurry to exchange weak dollars for solid gold. While the rest of the world slumps, it’s boom time for gold towns like Battle Mountain, Nevada. So, as long as the global currency markets stay weak, expect TauTona Gold Mine to get deeper and deeper.

Web predictions for the new year

We may be in the throes of a global financial crisis, but that doesn’t mean we won’t see innovation on the web. In fact, leading trend analysis blog Read Write Web reminds us of the old cliché that “tech innovation thrives in times of recession”. Tight economic conditions incubate intense creative and lateral thought, because […]

Click on headline link to visit matthewbuckland.com for full article

Maponya Mall

A shot of the astonishing Maponya Mall in Soweto, courtesy of Google Earth. Not hard to find from space. Ground level video of the opening in 2007 here.  Ray Lewis of the Bloggers’  Tour took this video.  Note the motorcyclists in the parking lot. Representative of a trend among upwardly mobile Sowetans.  Body-building also seems in.  And here’s a good pic of the main entrance hall with Xmas tree, from Deshanta Naidoo’s Flickr photostream.

A Fawlty Towers Christmas

I just had a Fawlty Towers Christmas in the middle of South Africa. There’s really no other way to describe it.

I had forgotten how different Christmas is in the southern hemisphere. Not only is December summer in southern Africa but it’s the month that nearly every South Africa retreats to some remote mountain or oceanside cottage for four weeks or more, not unlike the Europeans do during the month of August.

We fell upon a small village in the middle of the mountains in the Eastern Cape called Hogsback, a place lost in time…..English time.

We fell upon a small village in the middle of the mountains in the Eastern Cape called Hogsback, a place lost in time…..English time.

We had just spent numerous days and nights traveling through areas of the country loaded with Afrikaners and Zulus. Suddenly without warning, we discovered a mountain village loaded with English South Africans and British who must have moved here in the 1920s and never left…..or changed.

Hogsback wants to be England’s Cotswolds with views and mountain ranges but it doesn’t quite cut it. First, it’s much too small, so small that there’s no filling station and the tiny two grocers were so bare, it is hard to believe that the South Africans tout this place as a local getaway. It almost felt like a Romanian grocery store in the 1980s.

As you make your way up the mountain road for the first time, you wonder where the village will sprout from as close as five kilometers from its border. Then you see it – the sign with the hog. And then another one, followed by a smattering of guest house signs on the left and right, most of them closed.

A couple of traditional English hotels promise dinners and breakfast although aside from these establishments, there’s not much else.

We learn after a series of hikes to various waterfalls in the area that nothing is open for Christmas dinner except for the Hogsback Inn. Follow the hog it says, so we do. They offer a 6:30 pm buffet and since we have little choice if we want to eat, we arrive early. The English senior bartender who looks more like an Irish priest than a bartender tells us "no, its really 7 pm but the bar is open."

We enter a very English looking pub, the kind that the English must have brought with them some one hundred years ago and decided nothing could be modified for fear of losing their heritage from a country they once knew.

If you didn’t see black South Africans passing through from time to time, you’d be hard pressed to think you were anywhere but Sussex, or even Cornwall once you noticed the rosy red cheeked drunk at the end of the bar.

Of course there’s nothing but South African wine on the wine list yet the youthful looking white South African bartender shrugs his shoulders when I ask the difference between the Fleur Du Cap Shiraz and the Nederberg Cab……he doesn’t drink wine he says. The black South African bartender who is taking orders from the one or two tables lining the walls has no clue either.

He at least has a sense of humor when I ask him to bring us a bottle that will blow our socks off. We laugh together, he because he has no idea what I’m saying and me because I can’t believe how strong the colonial remnants are in this small untouched village. The wood burning fire glows as I look around and hear the voices echoing on this cool Christmas night.

"I had a lot of daytrippers," the owner of Nina’s Restaurant said, who walked in moments after we did. We had Roiboss tea at her establishment earlier in the day, a casual pizza joint with four picnic tables, which they moved from the shade to the sun since the wind had rapidly picked up overnight.

In her mid-thirties, she had a strong English South African accent and wore tiny colorful barrettes that were snipped to every two inches of her hair all the way down to the middle of her back. She wore bright green and blue overalls, funky sneakers and one wild yellow earring which you could clearly tell it was solo on purpose.

She hugged the rosy cheeked drunk in the corner and loudly wished him a Happy Christmas. This was a mere six hours after a very traditional English church service outside under a tree, where some 30 of us or so sat on logs listening to a very humorous 75+ year old minister crack jokes. They somehow managed to get a miniature organ to play even though we couldn’t see a power outlet anywhere.

I won a Hogsback mug for traveling the furthest to his service, followed by a skinny English woman in her forties who wore narrow gouchos, ugly German sandals and a dorky cap, the kind your grandmother used to throw on your head as a toddler to keep the rays off your face.

The humorous minister brought out a manger and asked the four children present to decorate it. Then he called for his technician and made fun of the Scot in the audience who was nudging him to collect money from the congregation.

It was one of those surreal experiences where you had to pinch yourself and say aloud, "it’s 2008 and I’m really here." Yet, the day rewound even further in time after we left the pub with our bottle of the Fleur du Cap Cab.

The dining room was a Fawlty Towers cut-out, except that it had hogs on the walls, a stringy looking Christmas tree with a half manger of four hogs trotting past it on a little tiled cliff overhang. Just beyond it was a massive oil painting of a cheetah, the only indication aside from the hogs that you were indeed in Africa.

The wait staff was a mishmash of white English South Africans and black South Africans, all of them wearing a hotel uniform that came out of the 1930s.

The senior English bartender who was dressed like a priest doubled as the play-by-play announcer at the God awful buffet.

Enter Fawlty Towers at its worst. We were politely told we could make our way to the buffet, as a very drab version of Away in the Manger played in the background. I asked one or more of them what was in each dish and damned if they knew since I received different answers from each of them.

We could at least make out the mushroom soup which had as much starch as the last shirt you picked up from the cleaners. After a few mouthfuls, my stomach began to ache. Where are the vegetables and salad you ask?

This is a serious meat-eating nation. You start your travels with such a question and as time marches you, it changes to "I wonder if there’s fried bacon in my potato, melted cheese on my steak or deep fried anything on any dish that sounds remotely healthy. You learn to ask about how everything is cooked, early and often.

The pork was as tough as that starched shirt you last got from the cleaners and the potatoes were like leather if you can imagine such a thing from a potato. Ah, lettuce and onions I see out of the corner of my eye. I ask. Pickled fish of course, although it looked more like potstickers that had just eaten a lemon.

Cold turkey borders what we were told is meatloaf but it’s a cold week old stiff stuffing instead. Gammon was not far from the stuffing and six jars of sickly sweet jellies circled the vast amounts of meat, all of which was covered in fat.

Lastly, the healthy bit – pork and lamb pies. With vegetables the waiter says with a smile. What this means is one lamb and one vegetable, an orphan green bean soaked with gravy that tasted like it had flour, sugar and bacon as its base.

We kept trying more certain that something had to be better than the last and of course nothing was. The staff as friendly as they were and as white as their teeth glistened (a rarity in these parts) pop by from time to time unable to answer whatever question you threw their way. It was as if it was the first time they worked in a restaurant and most certainly the first time their chef ever cooked a meal.

We smiled at the painted cheetah who smiled back knowing what we were going through. Sad sods you are he says with a grin. The black South African waiter walked over to check on us, my favorite of the lot. "You can have seconds, it’s unlimited, just pack it in," he reminds us. His smile was far and wide.

And we did pack it in because we couldn’t believe the food could be as bad as our last taste. The results continued to be painful and our stomaches began to sour. It got worse when we dove into chocolate malt balls as a way to cover up the taste. We suddenly remembered the four kilometers of potholes we had to cross to get to our cottage on the edge of the hill.

A woman walked into the dining room with her barking dog and swung around behind my chair. He sat on my feet wagging his tail, barking and licking my leg. He was on a leash but she let it go clearly oblivious and unconcerned that she was in a dining room on Christmas day. As she began to wander around the restaurant, he stepped into my purse sitting beside my feet on the floor.

They eventually left when Away in the Manger played for the fourth time. A gold candle shimmered on our table with an inch to go before it would burn out. Would this be before our stomaches did?

Our friend came around again for the last time to alert us to dessert. When we asked what it was, he said he didn’t know but he’d quickly find out. There is no quickly in Africa and so I start laughing out loud and so suddenly that he doesn’t know what to do so joined in.

He came back with his quickly rehearsed list: pavlava, that God awful English Christmas bread, Genoa cake, and vanilla ice cream (which we see upon passing has some kind of yellow oil through it). When we asked what pavlava and genoa was, he didn’t know and started laughing again.

I thought to myself, "he must think we’re either just happy people or drunk on our Fleur Du Cap." Yet, I was in a different world by this point. A Fawlty Towers world, as if we were really in one of their episodes and nothing happened to indicate we were not.

How did the Africans let the English bring this cuisine with them at the turn of the century and still serve it a century later? And so it came to pass, the end of our long Fawlty Towers Christmas in the middle of an English colonial village only a few hours from where the world began, some say. Hogsback South Africa and no I’m not making it up.

An Intense Journey Down Under…

I'm still on a deep down under journey and no, its not Australia. I'm still in South Africa a couple of weeks following a blogging expedition.

Time, space, perspective and engagement have all contributed to a brand new reality, one that reminds you again and again that you're not in Kansas anymore. Since the journey continues, its unlikely I'll be writing traditional Web 2.0 or social media posts for the next few weeks, or any for that matter.

That said, in addition to exploring the 'interior,' I am here for business reasons as well…..meeting with interesting technology and energy companies as well as South African entrepreneurs and heads who are working on innovative projects across the board – renewable energy, healthcare, politics, sports, branding, technology, agriculture, eco-friendly, science, and the arts.

More than a decade and a half since my last exploration of the area, the country remains as beautiful as it ever was……and as intriguing, mysterious, complex and stunning. The stories will be trickling out here and posted simultaneously to We Blog the World. Did I say Merry Christmas yet? From Down Under, the mysterious dark continent not the one that houses Ayers Rock.

San Language

An hour’s drive up the west coast from Cape Town, not far from Darling, is the !Khwa ttu San Culture and Education Centre. The San are among the most ancient peoples in the world. As David Sasaki reports in an excellent blog post, the centre is well worth a visit.  After a great lunch — the restaurant is first rate — we learnt about the language of the San and its distinctive clicks.

The Historic Sweep of Soweto

Developing Nations’ Carbon Conundrum

World leaders have reached consensus on the need to go on a carbon diet to combat climate change, and most are acting to reduce their respective greenhouse gas emissions. Global emissions are expected to continue to rise, however, with much of the net increase coming from developing nations that are not subject to the landmark Kyoto Protocol agreement.

While G-8 nations may want developing countries to follow their lead in pledging to cut emissions within the next decade, the distinctive energy environments in South Africa and other growing nations make it much more challenging to make similar commitments.

Like its developing counterparts of China and India, South Africa, from where I recently returned after a 10-day tour, wants a first world standard of living, and therefore a first-class power grid that encompasses the entire nation. Unlike the U.S.’ patchwork of utilities, South Africa has one major utility, Eskom, that is wholly-owned by the government.

You might think that having a single entity providing more than 95 percent of its power would make it easy for a nation to transition to renewable power and to introduce energy-efficient technologies. However, the economics of cheap energy from coal, a lack of competition, and government inaction are impeding South Africa’s desire to cut carbon emissions.

Eskom is expanding service to many of South Africa’s rural communities that have little to no power for homes. According to a 2006 report by the Ministry of Environment and Tourism, 41.9 percent of South African households were “unelectrified” in 2001.

The utility is having trouble meeting existing demand, which has been increasing by approximately 3 percent per year. Providing power to new customers, many which are great distances from the coal-rich areas where power is produced, requires not only more coal power plants, but also significant investments in transmission infrastructure to reach them.

In January 2008, Eskom resorted to rolling blackouts because it could not produce enough power. “We effectively shut down the South African economy because of concerns about a national blackout,” said Steve Lennon, Eskom’s managing director of corporate services.

Keeping the power on and affordable for the industries that are driving South Africa’s surging economy — gold, diamond, and platinum mining, telecommunications and auto manufacturing — is a federal priority, even if it means further tapping into the nation’s abundant coal reserves. To meet the expected demand, Eskom is building additional coal power plants and bringing shuttered plants back online.

More than 90 percent of South Africa’s electricity comes from coal, and that energy mix (which includes one nuclear power plant) is highly unlikely to change anytime soon. The country has among the cheapest energy in the world, with customers paying about one-fifth as much as those in developed nations, and the government has no intention of derailing the country’s hard fought economic progress by substantially raising the cost of power.

However, keeping the price low, and therefore limiting Eskom’s revenue stream, means there’s less money to invest in clean energy projects.

Even with the rapid advancements in energy efficiency and recent mass production of wind and solar power components, renewables can’t come close to competing with coal’s average price of 2 cents per kilowatt hour, according to Lennon.

Only a hefty carbon tax could help to tilt the playing field towards clean energy. The South African government is taking its first steps in that direction, as Environmental Affairs and Tourism Minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk announced a “small” carbon tax this summer that would likely begin in early 2009 and increase in size over time.

The South African government is also expected to pass feed-in tariff legislation in 2009 that would pay producers of renewable energy an incentive for delivering power to the grid. While Eskom will receive wind and solar power from these “independent power producers,” the company is not likely to develop its own wind or solar farms in the immediate future, according to Lennon. He does not believe in subsidies, saying that clean power needs to “stand on its own two feet” and only be undertaken when it is cost-competitive with coal power. Lennon expects several years of lag between when the feed-in tariffs are passed and when any renewable resources go online.

First Steps Towards Improving Sustainability

Because of South Africa’s continued industrialization and expansion of residential electrification, Eskom expects to double power production by 2025, which because of the country’s use of coal, makes a reduction in carbon emissions impossible. After that time, Eskom, which is among the top 20 entities in greenhouse gas emissions, expects to slowly start reducing emissions, according to environmental manager Dave Lucas. For now the focus is on reducing demand and the carbon intensity of electricity generation, he said.

However, South Africa has a relatively modest carbon footprint compared to developed nations, according to data from the United Nations. The country ranks 41st in the world in per capita CO2 emissions, with less than half (9.19 metric tons per year) the output of the U.S. However, its reliance on coal for both electricity and transportation (through coal to liquids fuel that powers a majority of vehicles) places the country well ahead of China (91st) and India (133rd).

Eskom, which has more than 500 people working in its climate change group, is working to clean up its coal operations and to change customer behavior to be more energy efficient. Lucas said the company can shave off about 3000 megawatts of demand by 2011 by working with customers.

Instead of preemptory climate change tactics that would begin to reduce emissions by phasing in renewable energy, Eskom and the government are focusing on “long term mitigation strategies” to prepare for the anticipated fluctuations in temperature and water availability in areas that are often starved of precipitation.

While richer nations are aggressively building renewable energy plants despite the higher cost, in South Africa, the coal economy will likely give way to a nuclear era, according to Lucas. As cheap coal reserves dwindle in future years, Eskom anticipates expanding its nuclear power program as a “carbon-free” alternative. Eskom recently put on hold plans to build a nuclear reactor because of the global financial situation, but that is expected to be a short term delay.

Barry Macoll, Eskom’s technology manager, said his personal opinion is that the country will be powered “by coal for the next 50 years, then by nuclear for 50 years, and then switch to renewables.”

Therefore, with Eskom and the South African government’s philosophy of maintaining cheap electricity rates and the need for clean power to be cost-competitive, it is not surprising that Eskom has no wind or solar plants delivering electricity to the national grid. Its functioning renewable power assets are limited to hydro-power plants, which currently provide less than 2 percent of its overall electricity.

Eskom is taking its first steps towards a goal of building up to 1,600 MW of renewable power by 2025. South Africa currently has just two small wind farms — an Eskom pilot plant of three wind turbines totaling 3 MW in Klipheuvel in the Western Cape, and a privately run 5 MW wind farm in Darling.

However, ample wind resources are available to South Africa. A 2003 study concluded that up to 5,000 MW of wind energy could be added to the national grid, and rural and small off-grid wind farms could add up to another 27,000 MW of power.

Eskom is currently studying the feasibility of installing a pilot 100 MW concentrating solar power (CSP) plant in the Northern Cape Province. The company is preparing an environmental impact study for the plant, which would use a series of heliostat mirrors to focus solar energy on a central tower, which transfers the heat to molten salt that is used to create steam to power a turbine. The CSP plant could be in operation by 2012.

Another as yet untapped renewable resource in South Africa is geothermal power. Lennon said Eskom has not yet “seriously looked at it.”

Eskom is more likely to reduce its carbon footprint by increasing the energy efficiency of its coal power operation. The company is hopeful that by burning coal where it lies underground it can cut CO2 emissions by up to 30 percent. Eskom’s Lennon said the underground coal gasification technology (UCG) “can revolutionize the way we produce energy around the world.”

The UCG process sets fire to coal seams, and uses the escaping gas to power a turbine and produce electricity. This also saves money because it eliminates the steps of mining the coal, bringing it to the surface, and then crushing it before burning it to produce power. Another benefit of UCG is that the fly ash resulting from the burning would also be kept underground, reducing the overall environmental impact.

UCG technology has been tested elsewhere, but Eskom engineers are “perfecting the process,” according to Lennon. Safety studies are still underway, but Lennon said the fires can quickly be put out by controlling the flow of oxygen. If all goes well, the plan is to begin an initial UCG project in the city of Majuba with a 1,200 MW capacity.

Going Forward

While action on climate change within the country may be limited so far, both the South African government and Eskom profess urgency in reducing global greenhouse gas emissions.

Earlier this month government minister van Schalkwy urged world leaders to proceed with combating climate change despite the global financial crisis. Eskom’s 2008 annual report highlights the need for reducing carbon emissions, and outlines the plan for gradually reducing the amount of emissions relative to energy output during the next two decades.

Eskom also acknowledges that it has work to do to become a sustainable organization. An independent study of corporate sustainability for 2008 found that Eskom failed in all four areas of evaluation (technical, economic, environmental, and social) with the scores falling across the board relative to 2007.

South Africa may have good intentions for becoming more sustainable as it modernizes, but the internal economic forces and a lack of impetus to immediately embrace renewables indicates there will be no significant shift in energy policy in the coming years. Developed nations shouldn’t expect South Africa to reduce its carbon footprint, unless they provide significant financial resources (such as investing in wind and solar IPP projects), or unless they can exert sufficient international political pressure.

Read more about South Africa

To the dawn of time

Dr Tiplady at Hart RAO with the SKA propotype dish

Dr. Adrian Tiplady, astronomer, engineer and accomplished jazz musician, is a key member of the team working to have the most ambitious radio telescope in history — the Square Kilometre Array — built in South Africa and other African countries. Earlier this month he showed us round the Hart Radio Astronomy Observatory in the Magaliesberg, where a prototype (pictured) for one of the 4500 receiver dishes expected to comprise SKA is currently collecting data on pulsars. Click below to hear him describe the project, its precursor, Meerkat, already under construction in the Karoo, what SKA means for South Africa and why he believes we will win the right to host it. In an extraordinary swords-to-ploughshares story, South Africa , he says, has gone from “a small, surprise upstart to a dominant player in the whole global consortium” working on SKA.

Basket Case

Our esteemed and cherished colleague, now fellow blogger, Nadine K. had a spot of bother exiting the gondola of one of Bill Harrop’s excellent balloons after a flight over the Magaliesberg. Honest, we asked Nadine’s permission to post this video and trouper that she is, she agreed: anything to bring traffic to the site.