Marek Very old truck
It‘s already hot when the sun peeks above the horizon. We jump on the back of a rickety truck, the driver closes the cab door with a bent nail and string. The car starts to the accompaniment of suspicious screeching. We go to Martapura, a town not too close to Banjarmasin.
The area is dry and covered with red dust, which covers us from head to toe quite quickly. The surrounding houses look clearly worse than those we saw a few days ago. We hope that the driver took the right set of spare parts with him, because the car is making more and more suspicious noises. He resembles an old man with asthma who has just had his oxygen mask removed. Fortunately, the journey does not take long (let‘s hope that the truck will also withstand the return to Banjarmasin).
The landscape is changing rapidly. The dry, red dust disappears at some point, replaced by red, boggy mud. Here and there you can see small, shallow lakes in which people sit tanned dark brown, rinsing water in large tin bowls. It is a diamond mine where dreams meet reality.
Unfulfilled dreams
Apparently, many years ago, one of the miners working here found an exceptionally large diamond. The sum for which he sold him may seem ridiculous to us, here it was a fortune that made him rich. The miner resigned from his job, built a beautiful house (almost a palace), and brought the whole family. He began an exceptionally lavish life, saving no money. The happiness lasted only a few years, during which he squandered all his fortune and returned to the muddy hole, dreaming of finding another giant.
It is not known if this story is true. However, what lies at its core is true. Here, real money is earned only by those who rent equipment, buy found stones, and grind them. They lead a good, wealthy life preying on the hard work of people who spend their entire lives in muddy holes. As always, those who keep their feet on the ground win.
The most experienced miners can see the tiniest piece of diamond in the mud being washed. However, almost never, they find those that deserve to be called big. Maybe they‘re not here anymore, maybe they‘re digging in the wrong places, or they‘re just out of luck. Dreams and reality are not always on the way.
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