Borovichi June 20th.
http://intellivex.com/project-profiles/28-the-church-of-jesus-christ-of-latter-day-saints-assembly-hall.html This took some shoveling.
We visited the Big Hole before leaving Kimberley. The Big Hole is a massive crater at the edge of Kimberley’s center: it looks so large as to be a natural feature, but it was excavated entirely by hand, through bedrock. The open pit is more than 600 feet deep, and via underground shafts the entire pipe of Kimberlite – the vertical fissure of diamond-bearing ore – was removed to a depth of more than three thousand feet. Twenty-two-and-a-half million tons of rock were removed from the mine, which produced fourteen-and-a-half million carats of diamonds. It is warm here in the dead of winter, and in summer the place must have been a hellhole. Major mining operations were finished in 1914.
There is now a little tourist village adjacent to the hole, with a kind of Wild West theme. And I suppose it was in many ways like the Wild West, with a special racist lean.
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