All mining exploration camps are far away. The camps attract a variety of people.

In all African exploration camps, there are a few guaranteed things: you will meet people from everywhere, from California to Russia, you will speak English, French or Swahili, rice and chips are served with each meal and there is no alcohol allowed on site. The Internet, if present at all, will be about the speed of a drugged chameleon. It acts like a chameleon as well – there are indications of life, like an eye which blinks slowly, a foot which hovers . . . all promise and no action, reminding one of the days of fearful blank, when everybody said that Windows II was really good software.

About 1 in 20 exploration campaigns results in a viable mine. The camps start small, as prospecting camps. If the prospecting looks hopeful, the camp becomes a true mining exploration camp and increases in size, and the geologists and drillers arrive. By the nature of Africa, the more the potential riches, the more distant the place and the more remote the civilisation. The rougher the roads, the harder the weather and the tougher the supply chain to the camp.

The people who work on the camp must be honest, resourceful, reliable, of sober habits and dependable. They must be willing to work all hours far from home in accommodation where they have to share rooms or tents and ablution faci- lities and do their own laundry. They must be at work, every day. The image of the hard drinking roughneck crew doing the job at the top of their voices is long history.

To get the right people, you have to pay, and pay well. For some reason, all these circumstances work together to produce a nice bunch you (meaning I) run into time and time again at odd places. From a distant Botswana diamond mine to a northern Democratic Republic of Congo phosphate exploration, I meet the same crew – ever moving, ever working. It is like having an extended family. You also meet the ever patient people of Africa. If there is such a thing as ‘noble poverty’, then they live in it. The only things that will ever help them are, in fact, mining developments – their governments will not.

The role of my engineers and me in this is the measurement of noise. In the old days, the mine was built and the noise from the pit, the mill or the treatment plant was inflicted on the local population, regardless. If a family member had a job on the mine, this was considered compen- sation enough. Things have changed: moneylenders like the International Finance Corporation will not lend money unless they have a whole lot of environmental boxes ticked, and one of them is that the new development noise levels should not adversely affect the local population. We have to know what noise levels there are before the development starts.

Consequently, we end up at the mining explo- ration camp, measuring noise at the villages around the proposed new development. We trek from village to village with an interpreter and, after a suitable discussion, we install, outdoors, in the care of the people of an African village for a night, a sound level meter valued at R135 000 and a tripod worth R4 000. By ‘village’, we mean a gathering of dwellings in the very distant rural bush – houses made of wood or mud, with no sanitation, running water or electricity. Or money.

We always get our equipment back (touch wood) and find that the sound levels are very low, the noises of the rain and the insects compete with very distant traffic noise. Then, after a week’s measurement, living at the camp, we go home, back to a city where leaving anything outside overnight invites its disappearance, where the rain is muffled and the insects have been long sprayed away, and where few people are honest, resourceful, reliable, of sober habits and dependable.

Once the mine is built, civilisation starts, but, like all things, something goes at the same time. It is easy to become philosophical in an exploration camp. I know I do . . . and I am humbly grateful for the experience.