Kalgoorlie Boulder traces its origin to one of the most
significant gold strikes in Australia. As we were interested in its history and
also because Sander would like to have a try at prospecting with his new metal
detector, we decided to stay in town for a couple of days.
Unfortunately we were very unlucky with the weather as it
was going to be hot (42 to 45 degrees) all week. The prospecting day tour we
wanted to do wasn’t operating as insurance wise they can’t take people out with
temperatures above 35. Such a shame.
Nevertheless we enjoyed ourselves over the weekend in this
dusty outback town. We visited the Super Pit lookout from where you can see
Australia’s largest gold mine. We went on a free mine tour (which is offered
every 3rd Sunday of the month) that took us in the Pit to get a
closer look from a few internal ‘lookouts’. It was very impressive to see as
the Pit is just enormous! The pit is oblong in shape and is approximately 4,5 kilometer long, 1,5 kilometers wide and 600 metres deep (large enough to be seen from space). Apparently they still find 60 kilograms of gold every
single day of the year. Ka-ching!
Beside the pit we visited the old (Boulder) and the new (Kalgoorlie) town center, the Sunday market, and the Western Australia Museum.
We also took the time to relax. I think we were having a bit
of a travel 'burn out' and we were just a bit over it. I guess the last couple of
weeks were slightly disappointing in comparison to the rest of the trip, mainly
because of the weather, the big crowds and things not going like we
hoped/planned. So we spend some time reading, cooling off in the pool, doing
some shopping, and slowly wrapping our head around the idea that we have to get
back to Melbourne soon-ish… back to reality.
No comments:
Post a Comment