African Gold

[1515Art]

My friend with the connection to the gold and opal mine owner in Australia just sent us some pictures she got from another friend with a mining operation someplace in Africa, The 8kg of gold from this location tests out at over 98% purity. Our friend is visiting us on Tuesday and I hope to learn a little bit more about the details, enjoy!

[beatup]

That's a nice pile of nuggets

[1515Art]

Not very much I can add to this story,  the owner of this gold mine/claim whatever is Chinese and I can narrow the location down to someplace in Zambia, should be easy to find from the amount of gold they are picking up I think you can see nuggets by simply flying over the area in a small airplane. The 8kg a one month total averaging 5kg to 8kg each month. Be pretty fun to go swing the zed over there although I’ve no idea the politics or dangers still fun to dream anyway. A different guy the owner of the Opal/gold mine in Australia is a gem dealer originally from China now living in Australia and his mine might come up for sale, I can only guess he is tired/bored with it and the difficulty in getting there. The gold they recovered was a bi-product of the Opal miming so the Opal mine could be playing out and may have something to do with the sale also he doesn’t really sound interested in recovering the gold???? Guess they have enough money the difficulty of getting the gold out isn’t worth the trouble is the way it’s sounding. That being the case if the stars line up and I know I’m dreaming a little here but, I might be able to get permission sometime in the future as long as he owns it. I can’t even imagine the logistics of a hunt something like that and the odds of pulling it off are to remote to think of much now.

[1515Art]

The Zambia operation is gold and copper my friend says they are selling the copper to Canada, the gold is under different restrictions and I’m not sure if it can be exported? They also have a large gem mining operation recovering amethyst, opal and emerald my friend says they employ a few hundred workers, although seeing some of the mining done off in the jungle on television hundreds of workers doesn’t sound unusually large. She says it’s safe there and they haven’t had any trouble, also it’s an easy 10 hour drive from the airport to the mines and access is easy. Now my wife and our friend are planning a trip for next year... following year Australia, we’ll see.

Oh, and hunting, I’m not much of a hunter but the have a hunting reserve of some sort, although I doubt I be much interested it killing anything.

[1515Art]

I was checking and the internet says Zambia is one of the largest exporters of copper and there are videos both good and bad and articles about Chinese mining in Africa a lot of it violates environmental and labor laws. There is also a Chinese company working with the Zambia government the little I looked at was reporting Zambian minister’s praise for their sticking around while the price of copper was dropping worldwide, I hope the company I’m being told about is a legal company and doing positive things there. The story trickles to me in bits and pieces and between my being new at this and general lack of knowledge on mining and not understanding Chinese language enough to be useful in conversation beyond asking for something like a glass of ice water (side note - it’s always hard to get a glass of cold water in China, they think drinking cold water is unhealthy) so sometimes i miss a thing or three here and there as the conversations always drift off from English to Chinese usually until I’m asked a question it goes back and forth. 

I’m wondering exactly how they are mining in the videos I watched they show heavy equipment and open pit mines in some of the really large operations, I wonder if nugget detecting is possible in that environment/geology? Truth is I’ve more questions than answers and find it hard to imagine what this operation is all about I’m curious to find out what mining company this is I didn’t think to ask the name of the group at the time over my general apprehension about long miserable air travel and unknown dangers and sadly communication is one of my weaker skills so my apologies if this is confusing as I’m still slightly confused as well not knowing much about this yet.