Diamond and the rough

The Bangladeshi cricket tourists in South Africa do not have the good fortune to claim Cape Town as one of their stops during the five-week trek across the southern-most tip of the great continent of Africa. So a visit to Table Mountain may not be on the cards but the African landscape has generously provided miniatures that dot the landscape.

The road from Bloemfontein to Kimberley, the Tigers' next stop, is dotted with hills with flat tops resembling a table. There are so many of them that in your mind's eye you can almost see a gigantic hand lopping off the top of the hills, which perhaps had gotten too big in an otherwise flat landscape, and carting it off elsewhere. The boring explanation is that these Mesas, as they are called here, were formed when horizontally layered rocks were uplifted by tectonic activity.

Kimberley itself is a small town, smaller it seems even than Potchefstroom. But everything is diamond here, because of the Big Hole, which is a humongous diamond mine in Kimberley, the contentious claim being that it is the largest manmade hole in the world.

To give you a better idea of how small the town is: we had been able to locate two taxis in Potchefstroom -- so far in Kimberley, we have found just one, called the Diamond Taxi.

The ground is three kilometres away from our hotel and if you did not know where exactly it is, you are sure to miss it. A small sign on the road, simply with the words 'Cricket' on it, points to a dirt road and quite inconceivably, another sign says "Entrance to the Diamond Oval." If we were not in the trusted hands of the Diamond Taxi, we would have thought it to be a scam to lure unsuspecting cricket fans.

The area that our hotels are situated in is posh, and seemingly safe, and we put that down to this being the 'diamond town' and there not being much poverty because of that. We were not long in our false sense of security. Our taxi driver informed us during the drive back that just a few hundred metres from the stadium, there was an armed robbery the day before, with the perpetrators taking off with 25 million rands. A little rough to go with the diamond.