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I have been fortunate enough to visit quite a few places in the course of my work but I think the most “middle of nowhere” place I have ever been was the bauxite mine in Nhulunby/Gove in the Australian Northern Territories. [Nhulunby is the aboriginal name for the area, and Gove was an Australian pilot who crashed and was killed flying out of the airfield in WW II.]

The bauxite mine and it’s supporting town (definitely a “company” town) are accessible only by sea or by air. There are no road or rail links to the outside world. The town and plant are in the middle of an aboriginal reservation and the only people who live in the area are employees of the mine, a few government employees (like postal workers and teachers), and the aborigines.

There is an airport and regular air service although I understand that the runway runs right over the bauxite deposit and will eventually get dug up.

Having never been this far into the wilds before, I frequently made a bit of a fool of myself. When I got off the plane in Gove, my host (whom I’d never met) walked right up to me and said hello. When I asked how he had known it was me he laughed and said that he’d known all the other people getting off the plane.

And when I rented a car (rather surprisingly they have a Hertz franchise) the manager asked when I’d be leaving and I said the following Saturday morning. She told me that they weren’t open on Saturday but that I could just leave the key on the counter. I asked if she wasn’t afraid of someone stealing the car… And she laughed and said where would they go with it (Gove only has about 5 miles of paved road).

I was staying in a small (and only) hotel in Nhulunby which is, I gather, heavily subsidized by the bauxite plant. Perfectly comfortable except that they didn’t seem to have any cold water in the bathroom. At least I seemed to be getting hotwater out of all the taps. It turns out the “cold” water was stored in a cistern on the roof. And in Nhulunby it gets very hot on the roof… So no cold water.

On the two visits I made to Nhulunby I had to stay over a couple of weekends so I had a chance to “see the sights.” There are very nice, pristine sandy beaches but I was warned (severely) not to go swimming and not to even walk along the beaches at night… Why? One reason was the stinging jelly fish that infest the waters for about 6 months of the year and the other was because of the salt water crocodiles in the area that like to snatch meals off the beach at night.

They may have been pulling my leg but the plant personnel told me that a previous visitor (from their parent company in Switzerland no less) had not heeded the warnings and had been snatched off the beach one night and eaten. Certainly, I did see crocodile tracks on the beach when I went walking during daylight hours. (And they were impressively big)

The other weekend amusement was being taken to the Nhulunby Yacht Club (a cinderblock building overlooking the water) where we sat on the porch out front and defended our lunches from swarms of flies (It is where I got to perfect my “Aussie Salute”… a quick swipe of the hand across one’s face to discourage the flies!)

One of my strangest (and scariest) experiences was my visit to the SASOL plant at Secunda. This is the largest synthetic fuels plant in the world and is situated on an open grassy plain a few hours drive east of Johannesburg.

My recollection was that my plane arrived in Johannesburg around dawn after an overnight flight from London so I was pretty exhausted and jet-lagged. I had to get a rental car and then drive for hours across the Veldte (on the wrong side of the road… South Africa is an ex-British colony). The scenery was pretty spectacular… Definitely “big sky” country although it was strikingly different from anything I have seen in the US or Australia.

Eventually I arrived at Secunda and that’s where things got surreal. I had been checked into Graceland Hotel Casino & Country Club (see photo). I drove up the sweeping drive surrounded on both sides by a treeless, windswept, and totally empty golf course to the hotel casino itself which was a fantastic thing like something out of a Disney theme park.

Under the entrance portico I was met by a tall, thin black man dressed up as Uncle Sam (all in red, white, and blue satin with a top hat, tail coat, and brightly colored suspenders… Braces if you are from the UK.).

Inside, the theme was 1800’s New Orleans and the Mississippi… The staff were dressed up like saloon keepers with straw boater hats and sleeve garters. The hotel was quite luxurious and new but it seemed very odd to find all this pseudo-Americana in the depths of Africa.

The next morning I drove out the SASOL plant and that also was more than a bit surreal. The synthetic fuel plant had been developed to circumvent the oil embargo imposed by the world community during the apartheid era and, inevitably, was a target for the anti-apartheid guerrillas. On the morning I drove out, a huge thunder storm was drifting in from the west, looming over the plant… And the plant was heavily fortified with armored watch towers. The overall impression that morning was like something out of a high-tech, industrial Lord of the Rings.

This visit took place a few years after the collapse of apartheid. Unfortunately, the end of apartheid has made South Africa, if anything, even more dangerous than when there was an ongoing civil war. All the South African engineers I worked with routinely carried guns when they drove to and from work… There were lockers at the gatehouse where you left you gun while at the plant. As a visitor and not being familiar with the local modus vivendi, I was pretty worried. Rather like a Japanese tourist who got parachuted into the South Bronx or Watts.