We were at Richards Bay Minerals, getting a safety briefing. The safety officer explained: “Hey, we’ve got 14 types of snake here. Of these, 12 types are venomous, which is to say, if you get bitten, their poison will kill you. Of the 14, we have antiserum for six of them. For the rest, if you get bitten, you can only hope to get lucky.”

So, I nodded. Mike nodded. Tim nodded. Off we went to do measurements at one of the mining ponds. Mike is a keen collector of orchids, flowering plants, with blooms. While driving to the mining pond, Mike grabbed my shoulder and said: “Stop the car! Stop the car!” So I piled on the brakes. He bounded out of the cabin and trotted down the side of the road and bent down. I could see he was fondling a red flowered wild orchid. Picking flora around Richards Bay Minerals was strictly forbidden. I leaned out of the cab and shouted at him to leave the plant alone.

Just then, Tim poked me in the ribs. “Look there,” he said. I followed his pointing finger and saw, yes, the orchid and what, to my novice eyes, looked like a blackish cobra, coiled on the ground just to the left of where Mike was busy grubbing out the orchid. I shouted again. Mike ignored me and then shouted over his shoulder something which sounded like “miss one plant . . .” Tim and I stared on.

Mike returned to the bakkie, plant in hand. We told him he had been about a metre from a deadly snake. We pointed it out. We drove on towards the mining pond and then followed the sign to the mining pond. It said ‘Mining Pond #’. And a speed limit sign. We drove on. All around were huge dunes of processed sand. Around the corner I had to stop. The road terminated at the base of a sand dune. Tim got out and said he would walk to the top of the dune and see if we had missed a turn. He was gone for a bit and came back and said it was funny, we had the right road. It then occurred to us that the dune in front of us was recent, as in a few hours ago. It had recently slumped and the sand had piled over the road. If we had been further on, it would have slumped over us, burying the bakkie with us inside. So we drove back to the turn-off.

We found somebody removing the ‘Mining Pond #’ sign. He told us that he was taking it down since the sand dune had avalanched onto the road. We said, yes, we knew. We decided to drive back to the hotel we had booked, the Richards Hotel. We checked in for a week. The following morning, as we were leaving, the receptionist stopped us. She told us we were being moved. To which room, we asked. No, she said, we’re being moved to the hotel next door. The whole hotel was booked. Yes, we said, we know, we’re booked in. Oh, she said, it happens that the whole hotel has been booked by government, for the Deputy State President, Mr JZ. We could do nothing. We had to move. They moved us to the hotel next door. It was unpleasant. That night, they tried to keep us from going into the bar where, they said, there was a private function. I refused. We had a right. So we went into the private function. Men kept asking us if we knew who had got the contract for this and who for that. The following morning, Tim reminded me of my advice to boil Richards Bay water before you drink it. An interesting site visit. Two days later, we left. I never found out if the Deputy President’s party found out about the water problem.