I am back in Hamburg.

What a change 2 days ago I was near Kimberley with up to 39°C and now we have -2°c.

But I am back in Germany. for 10 days

Finally the maintenace at Finsch is over. It took a bit longer than expected but finally our little diamond sorter is working again.
Friday at 11 'o clock we left the town after waiting for 2 hours for our parts from the ecovery to be released. It was a 6 hours drive until we finally arrived at the good old 'Oaklands Inn'. We came through quite a few thunder storms with temperature fluctuation from 35 down to 15. At one stage hail came down but it was flying parallel to the ground because of the wind...
Now 2 more days in summer South Africa and on Sunday night home into the snow! I see that Hamburg has 0 to minus degrees!!! That will be a change.

But in 2 weeks time I will be in SA again and then travel up to Namibia...

Monday morning I am back home!

By the way, especially for the people in Germany: Have you checked the weather modul at the bottom of my side? This morning I saw -1 for Hamburg...well, we have 35 :-)

Hello everyone,
Sorry for my very poor performance! I am tired of all my internet probs. Now it is the connection I am strugling with. I will try to get my self a 3G/UMTS card soon so that I will have excess where ever I am! But at the moment I am stuck.
Quick update:
I was on a 2 week holiday tour to Cape Town and Langebaan. I drove more than 4000km but now I am back in Lime Acres (Finsch). We are sorting out a few problems with our diamond sorter.
So far I am booked for next Sunday's flight home to Germany. Let's see if it will work out...

Cheers...

it was one of my longest journeys but finally I arrived in Lime Acres! Yes. Oh you don't know what it is or where it is? Well if you follow the link on the debeers website "http://www.debeersgroup.com/debeersweb/Diamond+Journey/De+Beers+Global+Operations/" (I don't know how to enter it as a link :-( ) you will find a red dot named 'Finsch' that's where 'Lime Acres' is located. 'Finsch' is the name of the mine and 'Lime Acres' the name of the little town.

It is approx. 680 km from Johannesburg and that is the distance I had to drive after my long-distance-night-flight. I (once again) hardly found any sleep. It was the first time though that two passengers on board got seriously ill...so there was constant action with hectic stewardesses and they never really switched the light off.
Anyway, after such a wonderful time in the plane with almost no sleep I got my rental car and started driving. It is actually quite cool to drive through the desert on your one. There is not much to see but it is fascinating... You have a lot of time to think about your life and the ones you love...
My best friend Katie was singing wonderful songs like 'closest thing to crazy' and I felt good. After 500km or so though I started to feel my tiredness or to be more precise I feld a few times the adrenalin in my blood when my hands slipped of the steering wheel. I never thought it could happen but I really fell a sleep without realising it... Scary!!!!

I opened the windows slept my-self hard in my face and then I finished the trip! And now I am here and will get bored to death over the weekend...

You guys/girls must enjoy yours...

Finally I have the impression that this side is up and fully working again!
So hopefully I will be able to keep you updated again. By the way you! Who is you? It would be soooo nice if I'd get a bit of feedback who is actually reading this blogg. Please those who sometimes read articles in here, send me an email. Just a note so I know who is still with me!!! ;-)

Thanx and tot siens,


Kai

i give it another try! honestly, recently i had big problems uploading new stories! problems? no it simply didn't work. the last 'test' message i tried 3 times before it succeeded.

well, back to my story. i have done a lot of traveling while i did not share anything with you. i was in cape town, went to the dessert of namibia and also spend some time in the centre of south africa - the freestate! people there are different - that is for sure. unfortunately i do not have the time to go into detail but today i visited a big farm owned by white guys. they had hundreds of cettle explained to me how much profit they make per cow. 3 black maids were only there for the house... you know, cleaning, cooking, babysitting. on top they had to garden boys and approx. 20 working for them on the field. we had 3 meals a day every time heaps of meat, even early in the morning for breakfast.
today was payday for the black and i couldn't believe it. these poor buggers earn...

are you sitting?

watch out...


20 Rand a day! That equals 2,5€ a day!!!!!!!!!!!
oh ja and 3 meals a day consisting of millypap, pumpkin or other funny vergies - no meat. but water as much as they want.

on top, the farmer told me, how badly he is struggling and he can hardly feed his family. i normally tried to stay out of pollitics but sorry this is nothing better than modern slaves!!

it was quite shocking for me!


ok, that's why i will leave this wonderful country tomorrow! thursday morning i will finally land in hamburg again!

tot siens.

I never thought it could, I never thought it would, but now it happened to me:
Last Saturday I was invited to a rugby match here in Johannesburg. A friend of mine had tickets for a VIP lounge so we went. You can imagine how cool it is if you get everything for free... so we celebrated the match even though we didn't really follow it! ;-)
Well, after the match a few more people stayed behind to cheer for the Lions who won. Several hours later we left the stadium - it was about 21 o'clock - in a very happy and little bit drunk mood. That’s how it happened that one of the guys just walked through the gates of the stadium and forgot that his car was in the parking area... well his girl-friend was sober enough to stay inside so we decided she must take the car, drive around the block and meet as down at the street.
I mustn't forget to mention that we were all packed with bottles and cans with drinks.

So we walked down to the street we were supposed to meet the girl and her car. When we got there a few black guys passed us. They saw the alcohol and asked if they could have something. So we started chatting a bit and gave them a can or two. Then the car arrived...

That was the moment when we were suddenly surrounded by 5 more coloured guys of which 2 pointed guns at us. It all happened so fast that we couldn't figure out where they had come from...but here they were. One held a gun right at my head and simply pulled everything out of my pockets...My friend was stupid enough to slap the one guy's hand when he tried to take his wallet...fortunately he was one of those without a gun. They also stopped the car and forced the girl to give everything to them. Then they just ran away...

Well, it is still extremely scary to think about the situation but I think it helped that we were a bit ... let's say under the influence of alcohol so that I didn't take things too seriously. If I think about what could have happened. Afterwards my friend and I decided to go to the next bar, ask for help and a drink 'cause we literally had nothing else to loose.

The most shocking moment of the evening was at the police station. I have no idea if it had a racial background but none of the police men wanted to help us or even open a case!! It is unbelievable, we report a gun robbery and the guys tell us to come back tomorrow, they are about the have shift change soon.
Fortunately my friend had friends in the police and called them. They were from a totally different area of Joburg but they came... What a contrast: they were white while the other officers where all black, each of them equipped with two guns and walked in as cowboys from a forgotten time. That's how I imagine the officers were like during apartheid times.
Anyway, those 2 helped us, opened a case, filled in all the forms while officers from that station watched them and even took us for a ride to see if they could find anyone... needless to say that we didn't find anyone.

That's the story how I lost my cell phone and my wallet with my money and all my credit cards, my id, and so on...

Hi Everybody,

It's been a long time since I last updated a story up here. I was so busy to enjoy everything in Hamburg that I did not find time to write...
Now I am in SA again, in Johannesburg. I will be here for a week before I am off to the Kimberly area. From there off to Namibia and Cape Town and afterwards back to Johannesburg!
It never gets boring...keep on swimming! ;-)

I will come back with more very soon!

... I made it safely back into my own port.

In the beginning the weather was quite bad - looks like it follows me where ever I go - but today Hamburg shows its beauty!

I will be here for 2 weeks before I will leave for South Africa again.