Skylab

I wandered off to the pond this morning, searching for the frogs that croaked in the night.  There were quite a few signs of other animals around (where we camped near Kalgoorlie there were none - amazing what a difference water makes) and I found the biggest tadpoles I have ever seen.  Like a wiggling sugar plum.  They didn't look they were wanting to move very much!

We packed up and left early, which is amazing for us.  Our first stop was for fuel at the Balladonia roadhouse.   This place in the middle of nowhere came to international attention when the NASA Skylab crashed to earth in 1979, trailing bits of debris from the coast inland.  President Jimmy Carter phoned the roadhouse to apologize for any damage, and the Dundas Shire Council issued NASA with a littering fine. (It was a great time to talk to the children about how the orbit of a satellite needs to be continually managed which requires fuel and  redundancy in all the systems to keep then reliable and appropriate costing and long term planning for re-entry to avoid embarrassment – Grant)

We wandered through their free museum, with interesting displays on the camel trains that used to make up the trans-Australian railway across the Nullarbor, and the beginnings of the dirt road, started in 1941 so that the military would have a complete coast road around Australia for WWII.  Now, of course, the road is bitumen and an easy drive from Norseman to Ceduna.

As we were leaving we saw Tony and Val lining up for petrol.  We are tag teaming along the road!

On our way towards Caiguna we passed a Jayco expanda caravan on the side of the road.  It was parked down in the gully, no wheels, and door and hatches pulled open with coat hangers and suitcases spilling out onto the grass.  It was the exact same model as ours, and it was tempting to look for spare parts!  But we were not sure about the circumstances that led to the van being there...maybe it had been left while the owners went to fix their car, or repair a tyre from the van, and others stopped and vandalised it while they were away.  Val and Tony told us later they got quite a scare coming up to the van, but when they saw the south Australian number plates, they realized it wasn't us.

Just outside Caiguna (they have names like towns, but all they are is a roadhouse), we pulled over at the Caiguna Blowhole.  After the blowhole we saw on the coast I thought this was where water spouted up out of the ground, but it turned out to be an opening to one of the caves under the Nullarbor plain.  The air 'blows' in and out of the cave and close to the hole it was quite cool. (Cooper and I went into the cave underneath and it looked like it went a long way in if you were keen to do a lot of crawling – Grant).  

Next stop was Cocklebiddy, population 8, where we stopped for lunch and the loo.  They had an aviary full of budgies and quails.  There were also a few baby budgies in a cage inside, and the lady I spoke to said they'd had a few hot days recently where the baby budgies were just dropping out of the sky.  They've had the largest flocks flying over this year than they've had for forty years, and sometimes it's just too hot for the baby birds. (Apparently they have a 6 km cave dive which sounds like a very risky sport.  This cave is now closed.  A landslide trapped 13 divers for 36 hours in 1988 - Grant).  The nullabour has a number of large caves.

 

We stopped beyond Cocklebiddy at the start of the road out to the Eyre Bird Sanctuary.  There was an information board warning of rough roads, and after seeing what had been done to the other caravan left on the side of the road, we weren't real keen to leave ours behind anywhere.  Plus we don't have much time to get across the Nullarbor before Christmas, and the four hour round trip would be way too long...so, we kept going.

Just before Madura, we pulled into the Madura Pass lookout that gave views of the Hampton tableland, that we've been driving on, and where it drops down to the Roe Plain.  It was a stunning view.

We drove past Madura and stopped for the night beside the road at Jilah Rockhole.  We never found the rock hole.  It was overcast tonight, with a few drops of rain. Cold outside.  There was a very yucky toilet with a few red back spiders spinning webs on the walls and beside the toilet.

Nadine came in the van soon after we'd stopped and had a big drink of water.  'Aah,' she said 'it's always nice to have a big drink when your tongue's all hard.'  Sometimes Nadine gets her words a bit muddled up!
-----
Vicki

On to the Nullarbor

We packed up slowly from Lake Douglas and headed off to Coolgardie to have a look.  This is an older gold mining town than Kalgoorlie, but it doesn't appear to have been as prosperous and is now a rather derelict place, with a post office, IGA, petrol station and mechanic.  That's about all that's open.  The nice old buildings that remain are either closed up, for sale or are museums.

The telegraph Office that is now the post office had the distinction of sending the most expensive telegraph ever.  It sounds expensive at around $2,000 even in today's money, and back then (at the beginning of the 20th century) it was a huge expense, as most people only earned around $6  (I can't remember what that was in £) a week!

Grant filled the van tanks with water near the dump point, and then when he went to fill the Jerry can, he realized the water was a brown colour. He had to empty the 200 litres out of the van onto the road which was a bit of an exercise.  First he had to get the van sloped the right way to tip the water out, and then he was wondering what everyone was thinking with all this water pouring out. Good thing there are not that many people in Coolgardie, although he did manage to park right in front of the town hall or something where a function was going on! Next he had to hunt for more water to fill the van with.  The last thing we want is to be stuck on the Nullarbor plain with not enough water!

We drove back down the highway to Norseman, and the turnoff for the Eyre highway which travels across the Nullarbor.  We made lunch on the free gas barbecues, used the nice loos, and put on a load of washing at the shell garage.  At $2.20 a load, they were the cheapest washing machines so far on the trip.

Driving east we noticed the trees disappearing and the shrubs and grass taking over.

We passed Tony and Val stopped for the night at a rest stop about 5pm but decided to go a bit further on, they get going earlier than us!

We have set up for the night at Newman's rock, a large stretch of rock covering a rise, with a little pond of water caught down the bottom.  It is windy, but warm, and we strung our washing line between two small trees and the washing dried in no time.  There is one other van here, but as soon as we showed up they disappeared inside. 

Tonight the stars are spectacular, our solar Christmas lights are decorating two small bushes beside our van, and we can hear the frogs chorusing from their pool of water.  A little further away we can hear the big road trains as they change gears out on the Eyre highway.  It's amazing how far noise  travels across the hard flat ground.

-----
Vicki

In the Pits

This morning we were off early.  We had a mission.

Tony and Val had told us about a tour of the super pit they had found out about.  A private company runs tours every day of the super pit, but once a month on market day in Boulder, KCMG (Kalgoorlie Consolidated Mining Group) offers free tours,  and the day is today!  That is so cool.

We arrived at 8am, chatted to Hal (a guy waiting at the door too), and Tony and Val until the shop opened at 8.30am.  Hal pointed out that the reason Boulder looks like it is run down and in need of restoration, with scaffolding over a lot of the buildings, and big cracks in their facades, is because of the big earth quake in Boulder last year.  Another gentleman pointed out the pub across the road, that was surrounded by scaffolding, and said it was the only pub in the world with a gold mine in the bar! He said you could look down through a grill in the ground at the underground shaft.  The pub was built before they realised how rich the area was, so then they mined underneath it! 

We got on the bus at 9am for our value tour.  We drove onto the super pit site, past some enormous trucks that could flatten us without even noticing, and stopped at a lookout inside the pit itself.

The super pit is about 1.5km wide and about 3.5 km long.  It is about 500 metres deep at the moment, but they are in the process of enlarging one end, and by the time they completely finish digging in the super pit in 2018, it should be 4.5 km long and 650 metres deep.  That is huge. That is still only half as deep as the deepest shaft from the old mines the super pit consolidated.  Our guide said they are investigating starting underground operations once they have reached the size limit for the pit.

We drove past the processing plant where they roast the ore, crush it, soak it in water and bubble off the gold from the top.  The current price of gold makes the whole operation very profitable.

After the tour of the super pit, we drove to the Kalgoorlie Baptist Church.  The pastor gave us a message on Jesus coming down at Christmas, we didn't have to meet him halfway, he came the whole way down, even to the lowly place of a stable and manger.  It is good to remember how much God loves us, and that he was prepared to do it all to get us back into relationship with Him.

After church we visited the market day, had some lunch, went to the camping store for a hurricane lamp, had a shower at the free showers in the train park, then drove up to the Mt Charlotte lookout where the reservoir is for the water in Kalgoorlie.

Mountain might be stretching it, but Mt. Charlotte certainly gave a great view of Kalgoorlie.  It is very close to where Paddy Hannan made the first discovery of gold in the area in 1893 and started the whole gold rush thing off.  The area has become the largest producer of gold in the world.  The main problem with the gold rush, though, was there was no water here.  People used to cart water by camel train and sell it at huge amounts.  It tasted disgusting, and if there was any rain that pooled on the ground, running off buildings or rocks, people would grab it.  Having no concept of germs carried in dirty water, they would drink it, catch typhoid, and die.  I think almost one out ten prospectors died of typhoid in the early days.

CY O'Connor, the Engineer-in-chief in WA at the time, came up with the idea of piping water from a reservoir near Perth.  A reservoir in Kalgoorlie was not tenable because the evaporation rate was higher than the rainfall.  Water had never been piped so far or uphill so high, and a lot of people were very skeptical and criticized him greatly, however the whole thing worked, and is still working.  He was very clever.  Instead of one long pipeline, it is really eight smaller ones.  The steel pipeline is 566km long, and originally had eight steam power pumps along it, moving the water to successively higher reservoirs.  They are now electrical pumps, remotely operated from Perth, but in 1903 when the pipeline opened, people lived at the eight pump stations along the pipe to keep the steam pumps working.  Pump number seven or eight was so remote it was known as Siberia.  The train didn't stop there, they just threw any mail or supplies off as they whizzed past.  The pump master grew veggies and killed rabbits and pigeons for fresh meat.  The water took (and still takes) two weeks to arrive from Perth.  It has been extended, painted, parts replaced and moved from underground to above ground, but it still has over half the original steel pipes.

The sad part about the pipeline is that CY O'Connor was so severely criticized and lambasted for this project that no one thought would work, as well as being criticized for his design of the Fremantle harbour, again that everyone thought wouldn't work, that ten months before the opening of the pipeline he killed himself.  The validity of his designs, however, has been proved through over one hundred years of use of both of these innovative structures.

Coming back to our camp at Douglas Lake, we had a good chat with Tony and Val.  They told us lots of great stories about the places they've been on this trip.

In Fremantle (the port city very near to Perth) they also visited the jail.  They went on a tour and heard a few stories about people who escaped....

Some Irish troublemakers had been deported by the British to Fremantle, however one managed to escape and sail to America.  There he rallied some support (I understand there was a large disgruntled Irish population in America) and headed back to Australia in a whale boat.

At a pre-arranged date, he anchored off shore, in international waters, then rowed in to the beach.  His friends in jail had by this time been put to work on road-building duties, and they managed to run away and meet him at the coast.

The police were in hot pursuit as they paddled out to their whaling boat, and when the convicts got on board, the police threatened to fire shots at them.  They hoisted the American flag and said they were in international waters and if they fired shots they'd be declaring war on America.

The police backed down and they got away.  On their arrival in Boston, there were 100,000 people on the wharf to greet them!

The other interesting thing Tony and Val told us about was about a little place south of Kalbarri and north of Geraldton on the west coast, called Hut River Principality.

Technically, this 30,000 acre area of land has not been part of Australia since 1971.  The maps we've seen of WA don't really advertise this!  We drove down that part of the coast on our way to Perth, but Tony and Val drove in and had a great chat to Prince Leonard (Princess Shirley was away).  He is over 80 but is still incredibly switched on.   Val was sure he has a photographic memory.  They have around 100,000 visitors a year, and you can even get your passport stamped, or buy some currency to take with you.

Prince Leonard was so annoyed at grain quotas in the 1960s, that he complained, and to avoid having his land taken off him he used old and forgotten laws to secede from the Australian nation.  He pays no tax, but has to make his own electricity and has no government health benefits.  The whole story is very interesting.  Apparently he printed his own postage stamps for the CHOGM conference held in October in Perth, and Prince Phillip found out and bought a complete set.

The weather is fine and hot.  37 degrees.  The stars are clear and bright.  For some reason the open cut mine behind us is quiet tonight, so we can hear the crickets singing.  Surrounded by peaceful, snoring Woolstons, it is a lovely place to be.
-----
Vicki  

Kalgoorlie

It is 10.50pm on a Saturday night, and there is still the sound of jack hammering and rock moving in the not so distant distance!  The recreation reserve where we are camping is surrounded by open cut mines, and although it is very peaceful here, and the stars are shining brightly, at night the sound of the mining operations carries a long way.

Some of the Excavations around where we Camped in the Recreation Reserve

We visited the museum in Kalgoorlie today, where we saw a mine head-frame, some restored buildings, and displays of gold nuggets.

It was very interesting, particularly the big gold nugget that was found near here last year....we really need to go get ourselves a metal detector, who knows what we are camping on.

A little restored cottage they had in their grounds used to be the home of a nurse in the area.  Her father was a gold miner, and apparently had the lease on the land where the golden eagle nugget was found.  Unfortunately he got sick, and while he was in hospital in Perth, someone jumped his claim.  I think most gold miners ended much the same way!

There was a display about the wood used by the mines in Kalgoorlie, and how, after 1900, when the trees around the town were all used up for stabilising tunnels in mines and burning for cooking and heating, they had to travel on trains to bring in the wood they needed to keep the mines in operation. Some failed miners found this more profitable. It was called the wood line, and at one stage they were bringing in 1500 tonnes of wood a day for the town.  That's lot of trees!  After they consolidated all those little mines, and dug the super pit, the wood all had to be picked out by hand from any ore that was excavated.  There are now big piles of wood pulled from the super pit.

We had some lunch, did some Christmas shopping, and came back to our little spot in the dirt. Cooper is a true three year old and had had as much sightseeing as a little dude can take.

We have been camping for a few nights now near Tony and Val, the couple we met near Hopetown, who are following much the same route as we are.  We had a nice chat this evening.  It’s nice to have some more company sometimes.

    

-----

Vicki

To the Gold Fields

We enjoy camping all by ourselves, in the middle of nowhere.  This morning we fiddled around, posting blogs and tidying up.

We were camped beside the road just north of the towns of Salmon Gums and Grass Patch.  Very cute names!  The train line runs straight up from Esperance to Kalgoorlie, carrying long loads of rock and dirt to the port, and the road runs beside it.  We heard a few big trains go past in the night, but otherwise all was quiet.

We are back in the red dirt and rock campsites, with scrubby bushes and dry grass.  Grant tried to dig about 10 pit toilets before he got one deep enough to bury anything!  It's a bit uncomfortable in the rain to squat over a hole.  I think we should invest in a seat!

One of the things we talked about this morning was fabric.  How different inventions have changed what we wear.  Initially Adam and Eve wore skin clothes, or maybe lap laps.  George of the Jungle yesterday gave them an idea of what that would be like!  To make fabrics, man had to work out how to spin, weave and knit.  And man-made fabrics like nylon are another invention that has changed what we wear.  We talked about zips, Velcro, and how the pearling industry used to also be big for button manufacturing.  How buttons at one time were in great demand, hence the development of towns like Broome from the Pearling industry.  'why were buttons so wanted?' asked Dom.  'To do up their clothes' I explained.  Dom still looked puzzled, 'didn't they have elastic?'....

We finally set off north again, driving the 270 km or so to Kalgoorlie.  We passed through Widgiemooltha, which had one roadhouse, and a tumbledown cottage behind it which was for sale, old rusted car bodies and all.  That was it.  In front of the roadhouse was a greatly oversized model of the gold nugget, the golden eagle, which was found by 16 year old Jack Larcombe in Larkinville, near here, in 1931.  It weighed 35.3 kg.  Jack hit it with his pick while working on his Dad's lease.  It was only 45 cm below the surface.

This story motivated our little treasure hunters, and just outside town when we stopped for lunch, they dragged out the shovel and tried digging up their own gold nugget.  It's amazing, though, how discouraging mud and hard dirt can be.  We are no richer this evening than we were this morning!

A truckie pulled in to the rest area and Grant had a chat.  He was doing a short trip from Perth with his wife, and they showed us the inside of his truck, with the bed and the little oven, fridge and freezer he has inside.  Joseph thought it was truly awesome!

After setting our van up at the Lake Douglas Recreation Reserve, 12km South West of Kalgoorlie, we drove in to look at the town and the Super Pit. 

The super pit is the most enormous open cut gold mine, at least three times larger than the mine we saw in Mt Isa.  It is so big it can be seen from space.  Alan Bond, an Australian business man with a mottled history, was behind the idea of buying up all the mining leases in the 'golden mile', an area of Kalgoorlie and Boulder that was very gold rich, and just digging it all out in one great big mine, to save money on the  process and also to gain access to all the gold that was being missed in between the mines.  He wasn't ultimately successful, but the company that runs this huge open cut was,  and they've now been digging it for nearly 30 years.  Grant said he could have watched the trucks all day, and I think Dom was the same.

We headed back to our campsite for dinner and a campfire.  It was drizzly this morning, but by this evening the stars had come out and the sky was clear.  Hopefully it will be good weather tomorrow.

 

-----

Vicki

Esperance

Only 10 days until Christmas!  Oh dear.  The urgency of the season has missed us a bit, because we are spending so much time away from cities and shops.  But time is certainly running out for the last minute gifts...

Today we woke up to overcast skies and rain again.  We decided it was time to move on from Lucky Bay if we are going to get across the Nullarbor plain before Christmas, so we packed up the van, said goodbye to a few people, and headed off. 

We drove around to look at Rossiter's Bay, where Edward John Eyre, after trekking across the Nullarbor from Streaky Bay in South Australia, met Captain Rossiter in 1841, in charge of a French whaling boat in the bay with fresh water and supplies on board.  Eyre was so thankful he named the bay after Rossiter. The journey of Eyre, his friend Baxter, and three aboriginal young guys was a bit tragic, with a struggle for food and water the whole way and the murder of Baxter by two of the aboriginal lads (they were all desperately hungry). If Eyre and the remaining aborginal boy Wylie, had not come upon Rossiter, they would never have made it the further 300 miles to King George Sound (Albany) which was their destination.  Rossiter treated them as special guests for 29 days, and then generously gave them supplies when they headed off on the rest of their journey.    click here to read the full story

Next we drove to Frenchman's Peak and climbed it.  It was a  big granite rock,  like bald rock at Girraween, and steep in spots.  I was very proud of everyone for getting up and down in the wind and rain.

We drove the 60kms into Esperance, also on the coast, and stopped at the Port Authority Park for lunch.  Just nearby was a little train running on tracks through the park, so we all had a ride through the tunnel and over the bridge near the duck pond.  Cooper thought it was great.

 

Volunteers run the train, and profits go towards improving the buidings and grounds.  In the last few years they have built a very cool 'shed' to store the four trains they have, and as an extra they added a clock tower. 

This project has ballooned to become a replica of Big Ben in London, and is very impressive with loud chimes and fancy copper roof and statues.  It is still a work in progress.

Laundromat, fuel, water and shopping later, we headed a bit over 100kms north of Esperance for the night.  We are camped in a roadside stop, and had a fire and marshmallows after dinner.  There is no wind, no rain, and no mosquitoes!

Life is good.

Lucky Bay

Slower day today.  We climbed the big rocky hill overlooking the bay twice, walked on the beach, (the sand was like cornflour, squeaky and all) played cards, ate lentil burgers, and enjoyed the sun that came out for a bit.

It is a really beautiful place, with clear blue sea, and little rock islands all through the bay.  They look like some kind of animal floating on the water.  By the end of today the campground was getting very full.  I watched a family pull up who we met at Shannon National Park, and then Tony and Val drove in, who we'd met at 12 mile beach near Hopetoun.  It's funny how you keep running into people along the road.

Roy and Jo are the camp hosts here, and they and their sons Max and Archie have been travelling for almost 12 months.  Max is about the same age as Oskar, and Archie is 5.  They are planning on being here until early January.  It makes me a bit worried that we are traveling right up to Christmas.  But I'm sure God will give us a place to stay, he looked after Mary and Joseph....not that we're quite the same thing!

Cold tonight.  jumpers and long pants.  It's supposed to be summer!
-----
Vicki