3.8km is a long way whether you look at it vertically, horizontally or any other way you can think of. Now think of going down. Deep down in the pit of the Earth.
TauTona is AngloGold Ashanti’s Mine near Carletonville in Johannesburg. Let me be straight with you here, it’s deep and you don’t really grasp the magnitude of how deep I mean until you travel down and further down and yet still further down.
As you descend down the shafts your ears pop, the heat becomes progressively more intense and the humidity is stifling, in fact I am becoming short of breath now just thinking about it. I cannot stress enough how deep this is. Jokes were flying around about descending toward hell because no one would ever get closer.
As you finish your trip down the third mine shaft you realise that the it’s over 30degrees Celsius and you are soaking wet from sweat.
That is not, unfortunately, where the trip ends. After exiting the third mine shaft you are a whopping 3600 meters below the surface of the Earth. Then you start a slow 200 meter walk towards that final active mining area in the west of the massive mine. This is still an active area and the tight, enclosed space where some of the mine workers are still active is scary as hell. The men are chipping away, embedding explosives, drilling, grinding and more. I couldn’t do it, I was so proud that I’d made it that far but got to the final 50 or so meters and freaked out. I turned back to what now seemed to be a very open space and waited for others to return.
Here is a video of the experience. The quality is somewhat lower than I’d have hoped for but the people in the now suggested that we leave all high-quality tech stuff at the surface as the humidity could damage the equipment. So this was shot on my little digicam.
What for the end, it’s a hoot to hear me wig out.
I am exceptionally proud of myself for keeping it together for the massive 4 hours that we were down there. I don’t think I’ll ever do anything like that again and I don’t think that there are many people in the world who can say they have traveled that far underground.
For more content from WeBlogTheWorld bloggers visit the WeBlogTheWorld South Africa website.
Similar Posts:
- DeBeers offshore Diamond Mine: Peace in Africa
- Cape Town by the sky
- Greenpoint stadium as seen from the Sky
- Soweto: Hector Pieterson, Holiday Inn, Nambisa and Kliptown
- Google Earth South Africa launches today
Popularity: 5% [?]
December 5th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
Scary stuff. I get claustrophobic just reading this, i think i’ll stay above ground.
December 5th, 2008 at 2:04 pm
Oooh you are brave. How do the miners do it? I am sitting in my sunny, bright office and battling to get my breath after watching this.
May 13th, 2009 at 12:34 pm
Hey Nic!
I worked underground for more than a year as a malaisha (the fanagalo word for a labourer – the lowest level worker underground)I worked not far from where your visit was. I was on Elandsrand Mine just around the corner. 3km underground.
Working underground is frightening but also one of my “biggest” experiences so far. It’s a completely different world down there. I was in a gang with men who does not understand English or Afrikaans and had to learn to communicate with them in Fanagalo. This is quite difficult when there is no one to translate.
There are many interesting stories I could tell you (rats the size of a cat, the cage that “jumps”, the politics underground etc) but actually I just wanted to share this with you as…
…I am a girl!