Part 47
How many of you have ever been on a really long train journey? Perhaps some of you have been lucky enough to experience the splendour of the Trans-Siberian Express which runs from Moscow to Vladivostok on the eastern edge of the Russian/Asian continent, taking a leisurely 15 days in the process.
Despite having visited some 28 countries in my life, I have never been to Russia or anywhere in Asia, so that the Trans-Siberian Railway remains more at the bottom of my bucket list. I have, however, made the 2,500-mile rail journey from my school about 80 miles from Durban, Natal, on the East coast of South Africa, to Walvis Bay (Whale Bay) Namibia.
Leaving by train on the last day of my schooling to join my parents who were in 1954 now living in the port of Walvis Bay, I discovered that it was a four-day and five-night journey, arriving on the morning of the fifth day at my destination.
It was nothing like any of the world-famous luxury trains that offered tourist adventures for the rich. In fact, I had to change trains twice on the way. However, the South African railways in the 1950s maintained a reasonably high standard of travel. Each compartment had two leather-covered benches during the day that could comfortably seat six passengers. At night, six bunk beds were pulled out from the walls of the compartment; three beds, one above the other on both sides with a small table which opened up as a wash basin, situated in the aisle between the two rows of benches. Toilets were positioned at the ends of each coach, and in the first-class coaches, showers were also available.
By far the most impressive part of the train, were the dining and lounge coaches with comfortable seating and remarkably good cuisine. Dining tables were laid with sparkling white tablecloths, fine cutlery and crystal glasses. Both lunch and dinner were six-course affairs and the food was usually excellent. South African rail travel in the first half of the twentieth century was on a par with most other countries, and for many was the preferred mode of travel. Later, as air travel became more sophisticated and as more families had cars, the railways lost much of their appeal.
The fact that for five years I had made the 1,200-mile trip back and forth from our home in Cape Town to school twice a year, made the idea of my 2,500-mile journey seem like more of an adventure than an ordeal. Little did I know!
The first leg of the journey was on the Drakensberg Express, a daily train between Durban and Johannesburg which travelled the 400 miles, mostly at night. It did stop, if requested, at some of the small stations along the way. Michaelhouse School was close to a tiny station called Balgowan. Apparently, many of the earlier white settlers in Natal were of Scots origin. Names like Campbell, Mcaulay, Armstrong, MacIntosh, Johnstone, Hancock, etc., still form the core of the English-speaking communities in Natal. The railway line outside of Pietermaritzburg, the capital city of Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal), through the Midlands of that province, had the names of a section of railway line in Scotland. These names included Howick, Dargle, Tweedie, Balgowan and Nottingham Road, with an intruder, Lion’s River, to remind people that we were still in Africa.
Johannesburg in late November, when I made the journey, was remarkably green. Set in the hills of the highveld, much of the area was originally sparse scrub, grasslands and endless rocky outcrops, containing a high percentage of iron in them. However, when gold had been discovered at the turn of the twentieth century, a mining settlement, originally called Ferreira’s Camp, grew massively when the world’s richest source of gold was uncovered. The camp was eventually designated a town, later a city, known as Johannesburg, or as the Africans call it “iGoli,” the place of gold.
As the deepest mining operations in the world dove down as far as four miles below the earth to recover the precious ore, massive mine dumps grew up all around the burgeoning city of Johannesburg. During the windy season around August, the strong winds blew the mine dust straight across the city, permeating every nook and cranny. In desperation, the city fathers decreed that as many trees as possible would be planted in the suburbs to try to protect the place from the sand storms which carried not only sand, but small amounts of cyanide, which had been used in the process of extracting the gold ore from the rocks. It is now claimed that there are more trees in the city of Johannesburg than in any other city on earth.
I changed trains at Jo’burg’s Central Station and took the train to Cape Town, stopping at Kimberly. As I left the place that was to become one of the most populated cities in the world in the twenty-first century, the country flattened out and began its very gradual descent from an altitude of 6,000 feet (on the Highveld) to the beginnings of the Great Karroo, a vast semi-desert area which occupies much of the interior of South Africa. In the 1800s, herds of springbok, estimated at over a million of these beautiful bucks, would take days to walk through an area. Tragically, they were mostly killed for their meat, and today only a few pockets of them survive, mostly on private game farms.
Then there is Kimberly. It is a small city that is famous for the discovery of diamonds some years before the first gold strikes on the Transvaal Highveld. The famous “Big Hole” still remains today. It is where teams of diggers sweated away in the heat and dust to dig a massive hole in the ground in the process recovering millions of dollars’ worth of diamonds. Eventually, the whole operation fell under the control of De Beers, who have controlled the world’s supply of diamonds ever since.
Of course, I was not doing a leisurely tour of these areas, but I got to speak to other passengers on the train, who gave me something of the history as we travelled along. I changed trains again at Kimberly and boarded the train that would eventually take me all the way to my destination. In late November, it was well into the heat of midsummer in South Africa. The further west that we traveled, semi-desert terrain gave way to actual desert. By the time we reached Upington, on the border between the Cape Province and what was then known as South West Africa, nearly all the passengers were going out of their minds with the heat and boredom. I never found out who started it, but one of the passengers bought a couple of dozen water pistols and handed them out to anyone who wanted to break the monotony of the journey.
It must have been an incredible sight to see most of the younger passengers rushing up and down the narrow corridors of the train squirting each other with their “pistols.” A very pretty girl had boarded the train at Kimberly, and I had wasted no time getting to know her. She and I formed a formidable team and we generally won all of our water pistol battles. The losers were only too happy to have been dowsed with water.
I was not immune to showing off in front of a pretty girl, so I climbed out the window of my compartment while the train was travelling at a comfortable 60 miles an hour, and I reached across to the window of the next compartment where a couple of men in their forties were standing facing the door to the compartment with pistols at the ready.
I entered their compartment behind them from the window and gleefully soaked them. They cried “foul,” but I had won the day. My new-found girlfriend thought I was completely crazy.
On the morning that we were due to arrive at Walvis Bay, I woke up early and looked out the window. I thought I was dreaming. On the rails next to our train was a miniature narrow-gauge train, perfect in every respect except that it was about half the size of our train. I later learned that it was the only rail link to a small town called Usakos in the middle of the desert.
Finally arriving at Walvis Bay station, the overwhelming smell of fish meal combined with frequent underwater sulphur eruptions greeted us. It’s amazing what one can get used to in time. I disembarked exhausted, greeted my parents, resisting the temptation to squirt them with my water pistol, said goodbye to my new girlfriend and prepared myself for a new life in a town surrounded on three sides by sand and one side by water.
I think it reinforced my ability to adapt to new places and new ideas, which has been valuable all my life and why I was fully prepared to look at a new concept such as ExoTech, without reverting to the fixed ideas and much false data that I had already absorbed in regard to the subject of computing!
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.