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“It’s very simple,” says Hasyim Asyari, who earns the equivalent of $250 per month to run the operation for the Dayak villager who owns it.
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With near 100 per cent humidity, a cotton shirt melts to the skin like Saran Wrap. It takes several hours hours to transform a bag of dirt into a bit of bullion, a process that will be repeated many times. Today, the soil sparkles in the Indonesian sun with flecks of pyrite, better know as fool’s gold. It’s 32 C. Processing material pulled from Busang is even more difficult than getting there. On this day, Lomban and his co-horts cook up a tiny bead of the shiny bullion after three months of relentless digging by hand to a depth of 30 metres. The material was bagged and hauled down the mountain, along a slippery footpath about 500 metres from the former Bre-X camp headquarters. River panning is one thing extracting gold from the land is another story. “Why?”Įven today, locals believe gold is in nearly every river on this island, as well as the mountains, where the most precious rocks are found deep underground.
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An Indonesian travel agent won’t entertain queries about visiting Busang. Even they are effectively cut off from the rest of the world, with no computers, telephones or mail service. The nearest sign of civilization is about five kilometres away in the village of Mekar Baru, home to about 700 Dayaks. Today, the journey to the heart of the jungle is just as gruelling as it was when Bre-X set up camp in 1993. Indonesian miners pour mercury into a drum to separate the gold at a rudimentary mine in 2007 near the old Bre-X site. Ten years hasn’t dulled the area’s seductiveness. You can bribe everybody to justify your story,” Wahju explains. Unscrupulous players salted exploration samples, adding outside gold to elevate the test results.
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Indeed, he says Busang was the perfect place to start a tampering scheme of unprecedented proportions. It gives you a romantic touch,” says Wahju, a former executive of the Indonesian Mining Association. “Limited access adds more to the mystery. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.
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