The World Seen By Sam: September 23, 2014 (Rovos Rail, South Africa)

September 23, 2014

Day 2 on Rovos Rail. As soon as I woke up we went straight to breakfast. At breakfast they had a breakfast buffet and also hot meals from the menu. I had an omelet. It was delicious! We met two people Karen and her husband.

Still on the train we went back to the Caboose we met a man from Cape Town and Eunice from Singapore. Eunice invited us to her house when we will be in Singapore. I am excited, it will be different. The man we met was very smart. He taught us about what ore was. He said that the spider that mom actually saw in our room was a Baboon spider. He also taught us about ore, is a rock that has metals in it like gold, iron,..I liked sitting outside on the caboose. The landscape that we were looking at for most of the day was called the Karoo System. It looks like sagebrush and flat desert and very dry.

Shortly after lunch we went to a diamond mine named “The Big Hole.” The Big Hole is actually the Kimberly mine. It was very big, and very deep. It is 768 meters deep. At Kimberly mine they mined worlds biggest uncut diamond which is over 600 carats, but not the biggest diamond. The biggest cut diamond is more than 3000 carat diamond that was given the King of England. Diamonds come from volcanoes and from the Kimberlite rock. To find the diamonds in the Kimberlite rock they had to crush the rock, and then pour water over it, then let it sit in the sun, and the Kimberlite turns into dust leaving the diamonds exposed. The reason the diamond doesn’t shatter when they crumble the rock is that diamonds are the hardest substance known to man.

The city of Kimberly was the wealthiest city in the world during the diamond mining. The Kimberly Diamond Mine was founded because of a young boy was playing by a river bed in the 1860s and picked up stones that he enjoyed and brought them to his home. He didn’t know but one of his stones was a diamond. He gave the stone to his neighbor who discovered that it was a 20+ carat diamond! This started the diamond rush and over 50,000 people moved to Kimberly. Over 14,504,566 million carats of diamonds were found in the Kimberly Mine. This diamond mine is closed now but they here is the home of the DeBeer Diamonds and also where they classify diamonds.

When we were back on the train, we rode by a lake that had 50,000+ flamingos. It was amazing! Flamingos because of the shrimp they eat. If they didn’t eat shrimp they would be white flamingos.

Tonight we decided to eat dinner in our room instead of getting dressed up and eating in the dining car. I had never had grilled lobster before. It was marvelous!