Gold Reef City is a theme park with a bit of a difference – it’s a touristy, former underground gold mine transformed into a theme park, complete with water slides, gold-pouring and a 200 metre chilly mine shaft. It is literally located across the road from the very interesting Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa.
When the mine was active, workers came from all parts of southern Africa to work in these subterranean death traps. You couldn’t pay me enough money to work in this job. I found this multi-national, multi-tribal, and multi-lingual underground work-force story fascinating, because these hard-working fellows could have been chipping away at a rock face for hours without realising someone had said ‘smoko break’.
Here is a rough mine map I photographed about 200 metres below the ground! Take note, this mine went down four kilometres (or 2.5 miles!) into the ground!
This place is great if you want to take people you don’t like into claustrophobic places!
A special language of approximately 2,000 words was invented for the mine workers so they could communicate with each other, avoiding the need for 100 translations and 100 translators. A number of signs were left around the rock walls as a legacy of this language, probably mentioning something about working safely in a not-so-safe workplace.
Don’t fart!
I also hoped being trapped in a confined space like this one (yes, I went down the mineshaft) that no one unscrupulously dropped their guts and light a naked flame, causing the economic powerhouse of South Africa to implode on top of us.
But if you hanging around in Johannesburg and feel like living the life of a mole, it’s worth having a look at these underground gold mine tours that are provided by Gold Reef City just so that it makes you feel grateful that you have an office job!