Adventure Capitalist by Jim Rogers

Author:Jim Rogers [Rogers, Jim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781588362902
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2003-05-13T05:00:00+00:00

The only night Paige cried from fear was the night we were forced by an Angolan army general to camp with his soldiers on the front line they were holding in their war with UNITA rebels.

It was when we reached the top of the hill that everything was made clear to us. About three hundred meters beyond the hill was a bridge. And the reason we had been refused passage was that by the time we arrived, the bridge, as it was every night, had been mined. They mined the bridge to prevent the rebel forces from either crossing it or mining it themselves. They removed the mines every morning. Had we crossed the night before, as the young soldier had been prepared to let us do before his commanding officer intervened, we would have been blown to pieces.

We met the general—more soldiers, more Polaroids—crossed the bridge, and drove into Benguela, a glorious town, uncluttered by foreigners, where we ate wonderful seafood. (Along this stretch of coast one finds the largest crabs of their kind in the world, and, largely un-harvested because of the war, they are available, all you can eat, for a dollar.) As we traveled farther south, we traversed some of the most beautiful countryside we had seen on the whole trip, completely untouched, untrammeled by tourists (as I suppose one would expect of a war zone).

The border crossing into Namibia, the former South-West Africa, took a matter of minutes. The customs agent seemed excited to have us. The immigration agent actually said, “Welcome to Namibia. I hope you will bring investors.” He did not know I was an investor; he was simply giving voice to government policy. The country’s openness to investment was sincere and had trickled down to the grass roots. Our reception stood in stark contrast to the treatment we received in Mali, for example. There we had come upon a billboard encouraging investment in the country, and our cameraman had been arrested for filming it. We had been subjected to more harassment at the hands of the police in Mali than we had anywhere other than Georgia and Russia. In Namibia, they actually seemed glad to have us there.

The town just across the border, Ondangwa, was booming. Angolans came here to buy all the goods unavailable at home due to war. There were warehouses, shops, new hotels. In Ondangwa I was approached by a smuggler who was associated with the rebels in Angola and who offered to buy my vehicles and pay me in diamonds. From him I learned that diamonds smuggled out of Angola were sold for an average $500 a carat in Johannesburg, South Africa. He showed me his diamonds, and when I finally got him to accept that neither Mercedes was for sale, he offered to sell me the diamonds for cash. He said they were worth $70,000. I paid him $500. I was very proud of myself. It was just one more skillful deal on the black market by the Indiana Jones of investors.

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