ICE COLD IN ALEX…The end bit.
There are quite a few things that always reminds me of Africa, the two main ones are the smell of wood smoke in the early morning from all the campfires which were needed for cooking and for getting warm. I can still visualise the smoke, especially around all the villages drifting slowly into the early morning sky.
The other thing was the wind which would usually whip up and blow across the site usually in the early afternoon, sand blasting your face, arms and legs. The only thing that you could do was to take shelter and after a couple of minutes you could see the sand cloud disappearing back into the desert.
I went over and had a look inside the caravan, it didn’t look half as bad as it did in the early hours of the morning.
Arron had boiled his kettle on the campfire, and we decided that for breakfast, we would have the rest of the Boer Wurst and use up the last of the bread rolls. I asked them how they had slept last night, and they told me that after they had covered up the front window, they had spread one of their blankets over the foam mattresses and slept on top of that.
I told the lads that our first priority was to off load the truck and then to clean up the caravan the best that we could. I would try and get the window fixed and go and buy a gas bottle, so that we could use the gas cooker which was in the caravan. Hopefully, we should all have somewhere warm to sleep that night.
Hans came over and I asked him where on the site he wanted me to park the caravan and where would he like us to erect our two sheds. He walked about twenty feet away and said “how about you put your two sheds here and put the caravan in the middle. We could build a carport over the caravan, it will give you some shade and you can look out over the site.” This sounded good to me so I started up the truck and backed the caravan up towards the fence.
The front window on the caravan was in an aluminum frame which was held in with a couple of Phillips screws. A long piano hinge stretched along the top of the frame, which was held in by about twenty small screws. By lunch time the truck was off loaded and I had removed the caravan window. Hans came over and asked could we go into Orangemund in my truck so I put the window frame onto the back of the Nissan.
This really was my first good view of the surrounding area. About five hundred meters away, on the other side of the dirt track to the north, I could see an area of green what looked like an oasis in the desert, which was the farm. There was a row of trees that ran alongside the Orange River. A small caravan park was not far from the farm which I believe that some of the farm workers and a couple of sub-contractors from the diamond mine stayed.
We crossed the Orange River over The Ernest Oppenheimer Bridge, who I think was the boss of Consolidated Diamond Mines (C.D.M.) and we stopped on the other side, at the barrier in front of the security office.
A security guard came out and asked Hans “what the hell are you doing in that thing”, as he pointed towards the truck. Hans introduced me to his next-door Neighbour whose name I can’t remember now. They both lived on what they called the ‘domestic site’ and I think that where they were digging up the diamonds was referred to as the ‘operational area’. Han’s Neighbour also happened to be one of the chiefs of the security at the mine and after a five-minute chat and after Han’s explaining who I was, the guy lifted up the barrier and waved us through. I think that you needed a security permit to enter the domestic area but because our truck, which had a Windhoek registration number, was so unusual the security guards instantly recognised it, lifted up the barrier and always waved to me as I went through.
As a bit of a thread drift, I would like to mention that the South West Africa vehicle registration numbers at the time, made it easily recognisable to know which town the vehicle had come from.
For example, my trucks rego was SW 32425, the S, stood for South West Africa and the W, was for Windhoek.
There was a large area in the north of the country called Otjiwarango whose number plates were, SO.
As Orangemund was only a small place it had the registration number, SC.
There was a town on the coast called Swakopmund, where a lot of the older Germans use to go to retire, as South West Africa used to be a German Colony before the first world war.
It always made me smile whenever I went to Swakopmund and saw an old German fellow, driving a big Mercedes, with an SS registration number plate.
On 21st March 1990, Namibia received its independence and changed its name from South West Africa. A couple of years later and that Nissan trucks rego number became N 32425 W.
Orangemund in the seventies was an amazing place and one of the most unusual small towns that I had ever seen in my travels through Africa.
The streets, some of which were bitumen, all had street lights with well-kept grass verges which were watered daily from the Orange River. Oryx or Gemsbok walked about the grassed areas and nobody seemed to take any notice of them. There was a well-stocked supermarket, a fuel station, a school for the children of the employees of C.D.M. and a church.
There was also a bakery, a very good library, a cinema and a recreational families club, as well as a pub. They even had a grassed golf course and a small runway for light aircraft light aircraft which I think may have been a dirt strip.
Everything looked well-kept and organised and I believe that they paid very attractive salaries to all of the C.D.M. employees. They also had a hostel for all the single employees who worked there and I was told that the food that they served in the hostel, which was provided free by the company, often included Crayfish which were abundant around that area.
They had some massive diesel-powered generators and I believe that they used to export some of their electricity that they produced, into South Africa to power the buildings at Alexander Bay. Hans showed me around the town and where his house was, which took all of about ten minutes. His wife worked in the offices at C.D.M. and his children all went to the same school.
When we arrived at the workshops, Hans introduced me to the manager who was an American, and he was also a friend of his. It seemed that everybody knew each other, as it was such a small community.
We took the window frame off the back of the truck and let the workshop manager have a look at it. He shook his head and said, “I am sorry, but I don’t think that we would have any glass to fit that”. He must have seen how disappointed I had looked as he then said. “What I can try, is cutting a sheet of Perspex to see if that will fix it”. That sounded like a great idea to me and he asked me if I could come back at about 4 p.m. that afternoon.
Hans and I then went to C.D.M.’s planning office where they let me use their phone to call our office in Windhoek. Albert was not there but Mrs Olivier said that he had left a message for me to come back up to Windhoek, after I had erected the two sheds. She told me that there would be a full load of electrical equipment to go back down to Orangemund. I thought that I had better mention to her about the broken caravan window and tried to assure her that I was in the process of getting it fixed.
Albert apparently had booked a flight down to Cape Town where he would be meeting Harry and they would be flying up to Alex Bay together on the Dakota.
After Han’s had finished doing his business with the planners, I asked them how much I had to pay for the phone call and the site architect just smiled and said, “it will cost you nothing, I think that C.D.M. can just about afford it”.
I asked Han’s if I could buy a gas bottle at the garage and he thought that it would be O.K. I have a feeling that I bought an 18kg L.P.G. gas bottle and noticed that the cost of diesel was considerably dearer than it was in Windhoek.
That got me thinking, how did they get all that diesel to power all their plant equipment and all those generators. I wasn’t sure if there was a railhead at Springbok which was 250 k’s away. I thought that the railway line from Cape Town ended at a place called Bittersfontein which was about 400 k’s from Orangemund.
I did know that Jowell’s Transport had a large depot at Springbok, to service all the mines around the area. So, it did cross my mind that if Jowell’s had the contract to transport diesel from the railhead at Bitterfontein to Orangemund, it was no wonder that the road from Steinkopf to Orangemund was so badly corrugated.
I asked Han’s if I would be allowed to use the supermarket and he didn’t think that there would be a problem, so I ended up buying some milk, fresh bread as well as some more Braai packs.
Looking back now, I must have lived off Braai packs for the five years that I was over there. I also bought a small hand brush and dustpan and some cleaning materials as I thought that we were going to be needing them.
Han’s and I returned to the site, we had probably been away for about two hours and by this time Arron and Joshua had done a brilliant job of cleaning up the caravan. I didn’t know it, but there was a pneumatic jack hammer on site with an air compressor on a small trailer. It had an airline attachment on the compressor and the workers who were using it had helped Arron to blow all the sand out of the caravan.
Joshua had been busy, he had taken the covers off the foam mattresses, taken all the curtains down and washed them. The only trouble was that a couple of the zips on the covers had perished because they were that old as we tried to put the foam back into the covers. The pelmet had been fixed and the fold up dining table had been attached back onto the wall.
One of the things that I was worried about was that Albert had fitted a small fridge in the caravan which worked on 12 volt/ 220 volt and gas. It was brand new and had never been used before and I just hoped that it still worked. When the electricians had fitted it, they swore that it had doubled the value of the caravan.
At about 3.30 p.m. I set off back to go to Orangemund and I was surprised that as I approached the barrier somebody came out, lifted it up and waved me through. As I passed the office, I gave them a wave and noticed that Han’s next-door neighbour was stood by the door waving back at me. I had put a five-gallon Jerry can on the back of the truck and called into the garage to fill it up with petrol so that we could run our portable, petrol generator. All being well, we could have the Neon strip light and the fridge working that night if both appliances hadn’t been damaged.
I called at the workshops to see the manager and he said that he would go and have a look to see if the guy had finished doing it. A couple of minutes later he came back with what to me, looked like a perfect Perspex caravan window. He even brought out some cardboard so that I could lay it down on the back of the truck. I secured it the best that I could, I certainly didn’t want to break this one.
I was over the moon, and I couldn’t thank him enough, and when I asked him how much I owed him, he just said “get Han’s a carton of Windhoek Lager and tell him that he has got to share it with me”, and then he smiled.
It was surprising how many ‘big problems’ were sorted out over there, with a carton of Windhoek Lager.
I thanked him again, shook his hand and then set off to the ‘Bottle Store’ or the ‘Drank Winkle’ as the Afrikaners called it. I bought two cartons of Windhoek Lager, one for Han’s and one to share with Arron and Joshua and of course myself.
By 6 p.m. we had fixed the window, got the fridge and the Neon strip light working and sorted out the gas jets on the cooker. We made a campfire and started grilling the meat but by 8 p.m. we were all sat inside the caravan, with the door closed, with the two burners on the gas cooker flaming away, trying to keep us all warm. It went really cold in Alex Bay in the winter, as soon as the sun went down.
The following morning at 8 a.m. we were all up and had the kettle boiling away on the gas cooker. After having some breakfast, we started assembling the two sheds. When we had finished, we maneuvered the caravan in between the two sheds. I jacked the caravan up, put it on some wooden blocks and swapped the two ‘good’ wheels with the two spares that I had brought with us. I also unbolted the tow bar and secured it in the back of the Nissan truck. All the paint had scrapped off the bottom of it, so we must have hit the road quite a few times on the way down.
I mentioned that Mrs. Olivier had told me that Albert was coming down on the Dakota. Well back then, the local airline was called South West Airways and they were still flying two Douglas Dakotas, which had seen service with The South African Airforce during the second world war.
I.I.R.C. their scheduled flights starting on Sundays used to be. Windhoek, Walvis Bay, Lüderitz, Alexander Bay, Cape Town overnighting in Cape Town. On Monday, the second Dakota would do the same trip down while the other Dakota would commence the return journey flying the reverse route. Each aircraft would do three return trips a week.
As the site where we were working was so close to the runway at Alex Bay, we sometimes saw those Dakotas twice a day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon.
Occasionally, flying very low over the site, we would see a South African Airforce Avro Shackleton, flying coastal patrol sorties. They would fly along The Diamond Areas and then go up The Skeleton Coast. They would return when they reached The Cunene River at the Angolan Border.
NOT MY PHOTO.
youtube.com/watch?v=IHk6sUK5v80
I left the site early the next morning while the icy wind was blowing off the South Atlantic Ocean. I drove back to Windhoek, loaded up the next day and set off back to Orangemund the following day.
After doing another two trips, Albert asked me to drive down from Windhoek and go to a factory in Johannesburg to pick up all the streetlights for the site at Orangemund. I seemed to remember for some reason that there were twenty-eight of them.
I was also told to bring Arron and Joshua back up to Windhoek as they had been there for over a month and the electricians who worked for us had started another job in Windhoek. By this time Harry had employed some more local electricians from the Steinkop area.
After four weeks of being on site Joshua had still not seen the sea, as the beach at Alexander Bay was in a prohibited area in case any diamonds were washed up on the coast. So, on the way back to Port Nolloth, I stopped off for half an hour just so that he could have a paddle. He didn’t know how to swim anyway, which was just as well as the water must have been freezing.
I remember clearing the site when we had finished the contract but for the life of me, I can’t remember whatever happened to that bloody caravan. I am certain that I didn’t tow it back up to Windhoek. So, who knows, maybe Albert told Hans to bury it in the desert.
geology.com/records/largest-meteorite/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoba_meteorite
There is a bit of an add on to this story.
Two years later I had returned to the U.K. and I was driving for Dow Freight Services from Stockport.
One day, I pulled onto The Telex Motel in Ankara, and a British driver who was already parked up there came over to me and asked me had I got any ‘swops’. It used to be quite common for other lorry drivers to exchange paperback books that they had read with other lorry drivers.
I can’t remember who the driver was, who he worked for or even the book that I exchanged with him but I will always remember the book that he gave to me as it was called ‘The Diamond Hunters’ by Wilbur Smith.
When I started reading it, I remember how I was gobsmacked after reading the first couple of pages.
It mentioned in great detail how one of the characters in the book, was stood on the airfield at Alexander Bay and described the icy cold wind that was blowing off The South Atlantic Ocean.
I thought to myself, how on earth would he know that, unless he had actually been there. I was really impressed with Wilbur Smith, he certainly did his homework.
And you have just got to admit it, Wilbur tells a much better story than I just have. 
