Silver Hills Gems

Gemstone mining in Malawi

Early in the morning our guard wake us with the words: “Your water is heat” It is 5:30 in the morning and a chill wind is blowing up the side of the hill where we are mining. A quick bucket bath wakes me up and I am ready for another day of mining aquamarine.

We are 2400 km North of Johannesburg in central Africa and the beautiful  Blue Crested Lourie squawk away in the nearby indigenous forest. We are in the warm heart of Africa and at 07:00 my miners start working. Everything is done by hand here. No sound of machinery can be heard. Nearby the dong of the school clock calls the primary school children to the classrooms. They all want to learn because “in the end we conserve only what we love; we will love only what we understand and we will understand only what we are taught” Baba Dioum

 

We do our planning for the day. It is a bit like playing the Lotto. You never know in which direction the next crystals will be found. The indicators are all there. We have some large sheets of mica and a good solid patch of yellowish feldspar that the miners call ‘Ivory stone’ .

We are close. By 12:30 we strike the pocket. It is a huge crystal of lower grade beryl. We keep on working at it and by the afternoon we have taken it out. It weighs a whopping 840 kg’s. What a feeling! There is nothing like it. The thrill of the chase and the eventual success at the end of the day. We try to take the crystal out whole but natural cracks break it up in pieces of around 80 to 100 kg. The one end has good color and I decide to keep it as big as possible and hope I can find a buyer that will want to make a nice carving from it.



After 5 months of mining I decide that it is high time to bring some of the merchandise back to our store at Hartbeespoort. Back in Lilongwe we have to deal with the mining department and the customs people and after 4 days we have the export papers in hand. Now we must get the load to our store. Easier said than done. Nobody want to take our load. It is too big for the couriers and too small for the large trucks. After two weeks of negotiations we have found a shipper who will bring it down.

The aquamarine  will be cleaned and in our yard in the middle of this month. I brought a few kg with me of the more glassy smaller crystals and these are available for sale right now. This is a limited offer and there is only 14 kg of this quality available. You can own this stunning stone by writing to us right away. This batch of aquamarine will not be listed on our website. You have to send us an email

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