I’VE been to some bizarre tourist attractions in my time, and having been born and raised in County Durham’s mining belt, I’ve also seen some pretty big holes. So when I arrived in Kimberley on Friday night to be greeted with a sign that read ‘Kimberley – home of the Big Hole’, my Saturday morning sightseeing was sorted straight away.

What can you say about the Big Hole? Well, firstly, it’s big. And secondly, it’s a hole.

Thank you, good evening and feel free to browse the Big Hole memorabilia on the way back out.

Actually, that’s being a bit unfair on an attraction that, while hardly the greatest thing you’re ever going to see in your life, is an integral part of South Africa’s colonial history. And having spent the best part of three days in the rest of Kimberley, the competition for something to do for a few hours is hardly intense.

The Big Hole is the largest man-made hole anywhere in the world. It’s 500 metres wide and almost 250m deep, and the entire thing was excavated by pickaxe and shovel.

Why? Because the rock that was dug out of it contained diamonds, and Kimberley’s history is intrinsically bound up in the discovery and exploitation of the richest diamond field in Africa.

The first diamond was discovered in 1866 and five years later, a number of gems were discovered at a farm owned by Johannes Nicolas and Diederick Arnoldus De Beer.

The De Beers sold their farm, which had previously been valued at £50, to prospectors for the sum of £6,300. It became the focal point for a diamond rush that drew in speculators from all corners of the world.

One was an 18-year-old Oxford University graduate named Cecil Rhodes, who went on to control 90 per cent of the world’s diamond production and drew a number of nations including Zimbabwe and Zambia into the tentacles of the British Empire.

He spent most of his days in Kimberley – one of the town’s most popular pubs, the Halfway House, still boasts a saloon area where he would be served beer while still in the saddle of his horse (the world’s first ridethrough?) – and helped found the De Beers Mining Company, a unified conglomerate that would go on to become one of the most powerful business forces in the whole of Africa.

Today, most of his legacy lies elsewhere, most notably in modern-day Zimbabwe, which was formerly known as Rhodesia.

Run-down Kimberley is not a town that looks as though it was once at the heart of his business and political empire. It was though, and one giant clue remains. A bloody big hole.

KIMBERLEY is actually in the Northern Cape, but Bloemfontein, the venue for yesterday’s game, is in Free State. Formerly known as the Orange Free State, it was home to the Boer settlers who emigrated from Holland in the 18th and 19th Centuries.

As a result, it is one of the few parts of South Africa where English is not the most commonly-spoken language. Afrikaans is the language of choice of both the white and black populations, and with blacks tending to use both it and one of their historical regional languages, a significant proportion of Free State’s residents do not speak any English at all.

In total, South Africa has 11 official national languages, and while some are more widely used than others, there appears to be a formal attempt to accommodate the majority.

Quite regularly, I have been listening to a football commentary on the radio while driving, only for the commentator to slip out of English and into Afrikaans for five or ten minutes.

Sometimes, and this is when it gets particularly confusing, they can even start a sentence in one language and finish it in another.

Most of the national television coverage is in English, but most channels in Free State broadcast in Afrikaans. In Johannesburg, it was fairly common to see programmes in Zulu, while in Port Elizabeth and Cape Town, a number of street signs are written in either Tswana or Xhosa. Once I get back to England, I’ll never complain about not being able to understand Brummies again.

ONE of the great things about this trip has been the opportunity to chat and get to know people from all over the world. I’ve talked about football with a bloke from Mozambique, debated politics with a student from Somalia and even bemoaned Leeds’ one-way system with a seasoned traveller from Chile.

So I was looking forward to another interesting discussion when a guy in an Ivory Coast top and a beanie hat came striding towards me in a bar on Friday night.

“Want to talk football”, he said. “Yeah, great,” I answered. “Who’s Newcastle going to sign then?” He was from Hexham and had overheard my accent a few hours earlier.

No matter where you are in the world, you’re never very far away from a North- Easterner