Next door in Northern Tanzania many gem producing areas are also located near National Parks: Emeralds and Alexandrites are mined in the south of the Manyara National Park. Tsavo is not the only region in Kenya or in East Africa where I visited gem deposits associated with beautiful Nature: visiting the ruby deposit near Baringo, I was amazed to see on nearby lakes millions of pink flamingos with colors matching those of the rubies mined nearby. Thanks to Campbell Bridges and Tiffany & Co. 2 – Green grossular garnet, named “Tsavorite” after Tsavo National Park. Indeed few days after we went to visit Campbell Bridges, a man claiming to be not only a gem miner but also a conservationist: Thanks to him, the green variety of grossular garnet is now associated with Tsavo National Park as «Tsavorite» (Pardieu, 2008).Īfter numerous visits to Tsavo since 2005, now each time I see a ruby cabochon from the John Saul Ruby mine or a Tsavorite (Figure 2), even if the stone is not the most beautiful in the World, I’ve a special feeling for it, a feeling that feeds from these wonderful memories I had about Africa and Tsavo! Fig. That day was just a prelude to a wonderful week. Witnessing there that herd of elephants less than one hundred meters from that ruby mineinside Tsavo National park, it was just something that I was only expecting to see in my dreams… As a young gemologist in love with Nature: I was definitively in love with the field in Africa. So going there to visit my frist gem mines in Africa was something I was very excited about. Since then Tsavo was for me synonimous with raw African wilderness. I first heard about Tsavo watching the hollywood block buster «The ghost and the Darkness» (1996) based on the famous story about two men eating lions who bring terror and stopped the work on a railway project in 1899 (Patterson, 1907). 1 – An elephant herd coming out from the bush in Tsavo, Kenya. Something was obvious to me: here in Africa, gem mining and nature were obviously in harmony. Covered in Tsavo red dust, about one hundred of these giants, were coming to drink near the ruby mine. Coming out from the bush a large group of elephants appeared moving out of the bush.
As we were leaving the mine, located inside Tsavo National Park, we drove by to the water hole created by the miners. It was a great one as we could visit the John Saul Ruby mine, that was then the most important ruby mining operation in East Africa. Tsavo, Kenya, July 06th 2005: I was traveling to Africa for the very first time.
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