Zambia

My trip to Zambia was my first overseas business trip, and after a shaky start with my flight booked under the wrong name I landed in Johannesburg early on Sunday 17^th April. Sue- the senior geologist and my host for a few days- picked me up from the airport and took me back to her house where I met her two beautiful ridgeback dogs Heidi and Terra.

Johannesburg wasn't at all what I was expecting- it was much more pleasant. Granted I was staying in a more affluent part of town and wasn't going anywhere near the dodgy parts, but the city is incredibly green- it apparently has more biota than any other city in the world- and although there is a heavy security presence and plenty of barbed wire protecting properties it is all blended in quite well with the neighbourhood. The weather was wonderful and we were able to go for some great dog walks and run some errands.

Sue, Riccardo and Brian assessing the pit

Harry, T-Bar and Joe ready for work

On Tuesday 19^th April I caught the train to the airport for my flight to Ndola in Zambia which is where the company I was consulting for, Mukango Resources, is based. Ndola international airport was a fairly relaxed affair, and it took a while to get my visa sorted. We were met at the airport by Luca and Riccardo who head the project, two very charismatic Italian-Zambians.

The first few days were spent as a team doing a run-down on the project, making a plan of action and getting equipment ready for the field. Ndola is the third largest city in Zambia, but is still fairly small compared to Australian or English cities with less than half a million people living there. It's close to the copperbelt, Zambia's copper mining region and also close to the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo.

We set out for our first stint in the field via Kitwe to the west, Zambia's second largest city, to stock up on supplies. Kitwe has quite a different feel to Ndola and is much more lively and commercial, although also much more run down. The mine site wasn't too far from Kitwe distance-wise but took us 2 hours to get there as the access road was a poor quality dirt track. On our way we passed lots of little rural communities and homesteads, which were not much more than a collection of simple mud brick houses with grass roofs and a central grass roofed communal area.

Mapping the pit

Zambia's Kafubu mining area where the project is located is actually patrolled by the military due to the it's value. Once we were through the checkpoint it was only a short drive to get to the Mukango mine, passing by some of the bigger emerald mining operations in the area- Kagem and Grizzly. The mine camp was a hive of activity as we arrived, with 20 or so guys all busily unpacking our vehicles and getting to work setting up new tents for us. In Australia we would probably only have one or to people on the site to do this, but here they employ many staff so that several people might earn a small wage as opposed to a couple of people being paid a bit more.

Mukango mine camp

The camp was well set up considering its remote location, with a few basic toilet blocks with showers, a rustic outdoor camp kitchen and a communal area for us to eat and work in. There were power points and lighting wired in, with a generator and solar panels powering the batteries to supply the electricity. We slept in large canvas tents on stretcher beds- probably more comfortable than I will be on my trip around Australia!

Traipsing through the undergrowth to survey the mining lease

The area was incredibly lush and green as Zambia has several months of rain during their summer rainy season. This means that all mining work needs to be done during the drier winter months giving a limited window of opportunity. The grass and plants were taller than I am in places making navigation and field work quite tricky, and there are several old workings and abandoned pits to be cautious of. The Mukango pit itself is quite large, and about 19m deep, however work on excavating the pit has stopped while we do a scientific review of the project in order to better target further drilling and excavation work. The company also has access to several other areas in the Kafubu mining district, so another element of the work to be done is to evaluate the potential of these areas.

After a couple of days walking around the lease a plan was made for the geological and geochemical work that needed doing, although at a much slower pace than I'm used to! I had planned a program of geophysics whilst in Ndola and had acquired quotations, and so my job was to help with the field and pit mapping.

Washing mined material to find the eneralds

For those who are interested in the geology of emeralds, and put very simply, the emeralds are hosted in metamorphosed ultramafic units, which provide the chromium content required to give emeralds their rich green colour. Where these have been deformed and faulted, hydrothermal fluids have penetrated the rocks and where these fluids have contained sufficient beryllium, they have produced hydrothermal veins containing beryl, which combined with chromium in the right quantities and the right conditions gives you emeralds.

And not only are we looking for the right spot in the right host rock which has seen the right conditions for emerald formation, we are then also trying to piece the puzzle back together as more deformation of the rocks has occurred since the emeralds were formed and has moved the deposit around. This is why the geophysical work will be so critical to understanding where better to target future exploration and mining, as the program I have developed will help with mapping the host unit and potentially also identifying where in the host unit there might be the emerald-bearing hydrothermal veins.

Driving to Lusaka past the fruit and veg stands

We spent a few days on site and then drove to Lusaka, the capital of Zambia. The drive was about 5 hours, and it was interesting to pass through a few other smaller towns where there would just be a few buildings and lots of stalls selling locally grown fruits and vegetables- piles of watermelons, butternut squash and tomatoes grown by the local people. There were huge areas for cattle grazing too, with Zambeef being the major farming company in Zambia.

A hive of activity in the pit

The aim of our trip to Lusaka was to introduce ourselves to the various government departments we would be working with and reporting to, and also to see what publicly available information we could acquire. The Geological Survey Department is setup (as with most things in Zambia) based on the English system, which in theory should mean that companies submit reports on their activities, and that certain amounts of information, data and reports should be available to members of the public. The reality is quite different, which made it very difficult to get any further information from the system (unless you have an insider helping you... but I won't go into that on a public forum!). I did manage to acquire the department's most up to date airborne geophysical survey, which was flown in the early 1970's and was all but useless in that many of the critical data needed to process it was missing- deliberately by omission or because it was genuinely lost I couldn't tell.

Lusaka was a big, bustling, hectic city as you would expect from the capital of an African nation, and had plenty of upmarket buildings, malls and skyscrapers and a university. It was fairly chaotic, and I was constantly amazed at the level of skill of our driver and how he avoided hitting any other vehicle. If you hit rush hour traffic (we did) it could take you an hour to go 100m (it did), and there are plenty of innovative people selling various items in the traffic- apparently if you drive for long enough you can do all your shopping and get a pressure washer to boot all from the driver's seat of the car.

The final week of the trip was spent back on site trying to get on with pit mapping. We pumped the water out of the pit and dug a few trenches to help look at a cross section of the geology across the pit. I did struggle a little with the slow pace of the work and some of the methods used I thought could be improved upon. It was also difficult to get a commitment from the senior geologist on which geophysical options she wanted to pursue, and so I handed over a recommended program of work and quotations. I very much hope to see that some of the work will be done in the future! It certainly appears that the area the company is in is very prospective, and I think it will only be a matter of time before they are pulling out gem quality emeralds from their pit.

Some of the field crew on the last day in camp