I am back in Belo now to wittness a real Brasilien wedding. So tonight we will party the way the real people party... let' see.

I have decided to change my traveling plans and will fly back to Hamburg tomorrow! So I will back in my old home town Sunday morning 8am

Probably everybody has heard of the the big contrasts between the rich and the poor areas in Rio that's not what I am talking about. We experienced Rio with 2 totally different weather situations.
When we arrived in Rio it was 1.00 am!! Our plane was delayed by 3 hours. It was a bit difficult since our online bokking of a hotel was not successful. So in the end we had to trust a taxi driver at the airport, who offered a ride to a good hotel. All the people at the airport lokked a bit suspicious including the man who drove us. But, we must say he was a good man, did not overcharge us and organised a nice hotel for us. COPACABA..right next to the beach...the dream of many....

But it wasn't so lovely... the next 3 days it rained a lot, it was constantly overcast and it was quite cold. During those days Rio was not very nice. No were to go in the evening, no bar, no nice restaurant, realy nothing to do! Then, after 4 days the city awoke to its full beauty! Thuersday morning when we woke up the sun was shinning. For the first time we saw the how nice Rio can be. The beach was filled with people, all the little restaurants and kiosks were open...it was like we expected it.

The evening we went up the sugar loaf and expererienced a nice sun set and night seen from there.

For us Rio had to faces and unfortunately only showed the nice side for 1 day...

I forgot to mention the bad luck we had so far.

Sure,Itold you about the flu but the were more things:

My hotel room is icy cold. Even though I can't meassure it I guess it is approx. 10° C. The floors are cold tiles and I think the wall are all a bit wet. (This might have hepled me to get the flu!)
I only have 2 thin sheets and during the night I constantly loose one or even two... When I was sick I always felt cold, so what I did was, that I took my computer's power supply in my bed. It always gets very hot so I wanted to heat up my bed for a few minutes...unfortunately I fell asleep (must be because of the fever...) ad when I woke up the computer was off and my bed cold. The power supply had burned through!!! So since that evening I have no computer anymore...very bad for me! Difficult to work and no entertainment anymore.....*buuuuuhhh**

On our first day to work again, we had a car accident. The road to the mine is under construction and looks like a muddy dirt road at the moment. When we drove there a car was in front of us. The driver decided to stop at the right side of the road but when we were almost next to him he suddenly started an u-turn... We smashed right into the side of his car. Fortunately nobody was seriously injured, but it took a lot of time to sort out everything and we all had a bit of a shock...

and I will not bore you with the stories from work. It was bad as well but now it looks like we are winning!

...keep on swimming...

Thanks for all your good wishes; looks like they helped me to recover. I still look bad though and my voice reminds you more of a rosty siren but inside I am almost fine! ;-)

Time flies by...I am already 10 days here (missed 4 of them by constant sleeping and running to the toilet). Today (Saturday) is a very important day for us workwise. Since Klaus was also a bit sick we didn't make such a good progress in the beginning. Yesterday we achieved the 1st good sorting results with our little MikroSort. Today we have to prove that the unit can sort emeralds in stabil way. If we succeed today and the sorting results are fine Klaus, Astrid and I are off tomorrow heading for RIO!!!! 5 days we want to stay there and finally recover fully from our diseases! I hope we can go!!!!!!!!!!!!

And we will also go to a bar tonight and get pissed...I think we deserve it!

LET'S HOPE THE MIKROSORT WILL SORT THE EMERALDS!!!!!!!!!!!! ;-)

This will be a very short update! I am sorry for the long delay but my computer is broken and I am quite ill at the moment.
Looks like I got a nice Brazilien Flu. Don`t know the English word but for the German: Magen-Darm-Grippe.
So I will come back as soon as I feel better...

So long!

I managed to get out of Yellowknife 2 days ahead of schedul. So now I am sitting at the airport in Calgary ready to go HOME!! I stayed over one night in the city but wasn't able to see a lot. The craziest I saw was a strech Hummer. You know thos huge cars used be the us army? That type of care but about 12 metres long. It was amazing and speeding on the high way. Yep, up here they love it big...

Downtown is a very busy and quite difficult to understand system of huge towers, bussiness blocks and shopping centers. All are contected and interlinked to each other via bridges. Quite chaotic or I was simply to stupid to understand...

2 more hours and I will be in the plane...once again..can't wait to sit cramped in a tiny little chair for hours. But I will survive ;-)

Not really an exciting story today but I have uploaded a few pics from this place of the world!

Have a look here:
https://fotoalbum.web.de/gast/KaiBartram/Snap_Lake


Enjoy! ;-)

Two days ago we had the first real emergency situation: 11:50, suddenly a voice over the radio on cannel 1: "We have got a CODE ONE!".
Wow, that was enough to bring the entire camp into chaos. People had to gather in the main hall. The kitchen staff had to stop cooking, the nightshift guys were woken up and the crew flight that was just about to land was stopped. (Means, it had to circle and wait... ;-) )

A truck was on fire. The worst thing was that it happened under ground. No body new the details and how many people were missing... After about half an hour all missing people were found and the fire extinguished. Only one person was happy and smiling: De Beers hired on guy to sit next to the radio all day to wait for a CODE ONE. It was his day!!

Yesterday we were stuck in the plant for 45min after a power failure. I was on the phone when suddenly everything went down. Sitting in the control room with the only light cooming from my laptop screen... We all had to gather at a central place again. The main plant has got em ergency lights so we could see a bit. Still it was quite spooky in that big plant, which is normally load and very light. Suddenly in the dark with no noise at all. Pure silence.

And then all the motors started up again and the lights fired up, too.

What an exciting time!!!

About our work: The MikroSort units perform very well. We have a result of up to 94% waste rejection with only 3% Kimberlite loss. Due to the good results and the hard work every\body puts in we will finish the test compain earlier. Hopefully by tommorrow we should be through. So I can leave the mine and visit the Diavik mine for a day. Latest on Thursday I will be on the plan back to Germany.

I am soooooo happy that I am here during summer! Unbelievable what winters must be like. Some of the days it is absolutely freesing and other days the temperatures go up to 15°C. All the lakes are still partly covered with ice.

The nice thing is (even thoug you have to get used to it) that the sun hardly goes down. 11 o'clock at night it is still day bright outside, the sun is quite high and not even red or orange but still white.

The entire setup here reminds me of one of those arctic explorations you sometimes see on TV. Ok, there is no snow right now but we all live in containers put together. It is a camp made of containers. Beeing here is a totally new experience. The warm days up here in summer are colder than the normal winter days in South Africa.

Our work is going pretty well. The first few days we were here with 3 people from Scan & Sort. Klaus and Silvio had to do the hard work - mechanical upgrade of the unit. Afterwards I took over for the easier part with the test work. The waste rock sorter does exactly what we want it to do, it separates waste from Kimberlite. We rejected 94% of the granite yesterday and only lost 3% Kimberlite. I think that was pretty good.

I have uploaded some fotos, you can check them out under:

https://fotoalbum.web.de/gast/KaiBartram/Snap_Lake

That's it for now.

I must say Yellowknife presented it self to me in a very nice way. Sun shine and temperatures of up to 15 degrees but this part of the world in a totally new light. It is a bit strange though that people here run around in shorts and slippers, even in the evenings when the temperatures drop down to 1-5°C. But I was told that even -10°C feel very pleasant for the people here cause -40° is simply a different story.

Only Canadian North (The Airline that took me here) did not perform very well. I landed meanwhile 2 days ago but I still haven't seen or heard anything of my suitcase. The told me that night that they could track it down to Calgary and it would only take a couple of hours to get it here...

This morning I am leaving for the mine! I have spent 4 days in the same clothes now and I have no idea what to do on sight! It is really unbelievable!

Well anyway, now I will be on may another 200 Km further north...closer to the arctic cirle! Even here it never gets dark so I will see what it will be like up there. I took many fotos and will put them online soon!

It is 23.30 (7.30 in the morning in Germany!) and I have finally arrived in my hotel in Yellowknife...but my suitcase has not! So after the night in Frankfurt without any stuff it's going to be my second night without being able to change clothes. I guess my socks will greet me tomorrow morning or simply run away cause of embarrassment.

Even though it is so late and I am terribly tired I am unable to sleep. I probably have to calm down a bit but the light outside doesn't help! As you see on the photo (only taken minutes ago!) it is still light outside.



I really feel like in the middle of nowhere. Flying into this place you could see nothing but lakes interupted by small forrests. A very beautiful scenery. But I will try and sleep now. Let's once again wait and see what tomorrow brings... (first of all hopefully my suitcase!)

I arived in Canada Edmonton!!!! Now I will see if I will still get to Yellowknife....

Wish me luck! ;-)

...firts of all ended in a hotel in Frankfurt (Germany)!
It was a crazy day with hundreds of unlucky events and I hope I will never ever have a day like this again.

Early this morning when I had to get up I really didn't feel like it... I still have a cold and feel a bit miserable. That's why I'd preferred to stay at home instead of driving to the airport to start a 3 day journey. I was supposed to fly to Montreal, then to Edmonton and via Yellowknife to Snap Lake. Quite a journey...

It all started with the fact that my Passport was gone and that the Scan & Sort technician on site realized that we sent a wrong belt...

I spend the whole day to sort these 2 problems out. Now a courier is on his way from Hamburg to Frankfurt to hand the belt over to me so I can take it with me to Canada.

Now I am very tired and exhausted… Let’s see what tomorrow brings…