THE MAGALIESBERG

The Magaliesberg is a very old mountain range. Two and a half to two billion years old. About half the age of the Earth itself. One hundred times older than Mount Everest and seventeen times older than Table Mountain!

What happened is that a large piece of the Earth’s crust, 140 km long broke loose and tilted toward the North. In this picture taken from the top of Voortrekker Monument one can see the oldest tilt in the foreground, the green little hills across the motorway. The second tilt lies just behind the Pretoria city bowl, these are the Daspoort Rand and Meintjieskop on which the Union Building are built. The distant range at the back are the Magaliesberg Mountains that lie beyond the Moot (the Moat) area separating Pretoria from the Pretoria North area.

This picture from Wikipedia shows the Magaliesberg tilt very well. 

The northern part of the tilt plunged deep into the Earth’s mantel and magna filled a lake 140 km long and about 100 km wide. The tick layer of molten magna was at about 1,600 degrees and cooled down slowly. Different minerals solidify at different temperatures. As a result the platinum group of metals solidified in a reef, the Merensky Reef at what is now about 500m below the surface. Behind the Magalies lies 80 percent of the World’s known platinum resources, of which 60 percent of the World production is mined. With the platinum lies 70 percent of the World’s know chrome resources, fro which 50 percent of the World’s production comes. This is smelted in large chrome smelters to produce stainless steel for export to mainly Germany, China and Japan.

With this lies 95 percent of the World’s known vanadium, that is use in the hardening of aluminium fuselages’ in modern aircraft and spacecraft!

Truly, the Magalies produces South Africa’s new gold!

Pilanesberg always has something special at every visit

It is not only the big five in the Pilanesberg that can enthral and engage your attention completely. On a tour to the park on the 3rd of January a visitor was overheard at the bird hide at Mankwe lake saying: “This place is fantastic. We have seen more here in a morning than in a week in the Etosha”.

Some things, big and small, beautiful and not so good looking, that caught our eye were:

The bright Red Bishop weaver at the lake.

Here we also saw the longest water monitor (leguane) I have ever seen, large terrapins basking on a log, a baby crocodile, and a kingfisher dive bombing a small fish in the water.

A baby zebra curiously came up and smelt our vehicles front tyre. It might have been the smell of the elephant pooh we drove over earlier that caught his interest.

A family of warthogs, dad mom and six brothers and sisters. The only pig that avoids forests and lives on the savannah, it grazes grass. The litters are usually 3 to 4 piglets, so this was an exceptionally large litter.

One is always in awe of the majestic size of a giraffe. Look how the bouwildebees (gnu) is dwarfed by this female giraffe!

Springbok used to roam the drier western parts of South Africa in large herds with migrations larger than the Serengeti, hence the Afrikaans name ‘rebuke’. Pilanesberg is a transition zone between the western savannah and the bushveld. This makes it the only park in South Africa where both the springbok and the impala occur naturally.