At the age of 69 Jan De Beer has come to seek his fortune digging for diamonds. Vast high-tech mines may provide the bulk of the global diamond market but next to South Africa's Vaal river hundreds of prospectors still make a living using a basic pick, shovel and pan. De Beer, who has retired from a job with a local council in the central Karoo desert, is working the alluvial diamond diggings at Verlorenshoop - Afrikaans for Lost Hope - some 60 km (37.5 miles) north-west of the huge Kimberley mines.
He says his wife and family wished him luck before he came here. Most of the local settlements have names given during the first diamond rush in the late 19th century.
"After I went on pension for the council, I came looking for more adventure," he says in Afrikaans through an interpreter. "But I have only found one small diamond."
Several hundred small scale diamond diggers - most of them mixed race - work the alluvial deposits by the river, breaking up the rock with picks and shovels, sieving out the larger fragments until eventually any diamonds are filtered out and can be picked out by hand.
Most of them work for small companies owned by other diggers, but each will get a commission if a diamond is found while they are at work on a site. Some, like 18-year-old Anthony Krull, are following in the footsteps of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers.
Krull has been working the Verlorenshoop site, which lies at the side of a larger industrial diamond digging operation, for a couple of months. Sometimes the seven or eight diggers on the site will find two to three diamonds a month, sometimes none.
"The best we've found on this site was an 11-1/2 carat diamond," he says. The gem was sold for 450,000 rand ($73,750).
The small-scale diggers work through the areas missed by medium-scale industrial operators who use heavy machinery to crush down rocks but miss some of the harder-to-find gems. The smaller diggers pan out the larger rocks and eventually break down what remains to find the diamonds.
The diamonds in the deposits of the Vaal river were swept along from Kimberley, where pipes of volcanic rock that once fuelled volcanoes swept diamonds up from where huge pressures had formed them more than 100 km (miles) underground.
Mining giant De Beers says it will continue to process the spoil heaps at Kimberley to recover diamonds missed by previous generations for decades to come, but deep mining production on the site will cease within the next decade - leaving just the small and medium operators.
De Beers is majority-owned by mining and industrial giant Anglo American.
Diggers like Krull live in informal settlements, five or six to a small house with a couple of rooms, within a few kilometres of the edge of the river, although a few will make their fortune with one or two big finds and enlarge their properties.
Those who make it lucky could move away but tour guide Dirk Potgieter, whose great-grandfather prospected for diamonds in the same area, says many cannot break the habit of working in the lucrative trade.
"It's an addiction, like gambling," he says. "Or sex. There are few industries where you can make money so fast, but you can also go bankrupt.
"Almost all the people around here are either in the legitimate diamond business, or the illegitimate diamond business."
Diamond diggers, cutters, polishers and sellers need licences from the South African government, whether they are small scale panners with 1870s technology or giant operations like De Beers, but police and government officials frequently try to crack down on illegal sales.
"There's one digger out here who every time they inspect him they ask for a police escort because they know they're going to get clobbered," says Potgieter. "They look after their own, and those who mess with them are buried out here in unmarked graves."

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