William treated us to a sleep in this morning until 7am. We were up having brekkie while Jean & Steven went across the road to see how David was. We are glad to report that he was given the approval to leave, but under instruction to increase his water intake. They took off ahead of us again so we doubt we will see them until we get home. Kelley drive this morning and we aimed for our first stop to be Coolgardie. We briefly stopped to chat with the Barnes’ who had stopped for petrol but didn’t chat for long. Neil had read about a lookout over an old gold mine in the area so we drove to look at it. It was so deep that we couldn’t even see the bottom from the lookout, which was disappointing.
We drove through to Kalgoorlie and arrived at about 12.30pm. By the time we found a caravan park and checked in it was after 1pm and we had missed the chance to watch a blasting at the big gold mine in town. Our Caravan Park is actually in Boulder and Neil had read that Kalgoorlie-Boulder is the only town in Australia to have 2 main streets. We unhooked the trailer and drove into town to visit the Kalgoorlie visitor centre. We were hoping to take William on the old steam train but since discovered it, and many other buildings, were damaged by an earthquake that hit the town nearly 2 years ago and hadn’t reopened. We grabbed a few leaflets and went for a walk through town for lunch. We decided on Judd’s Hotel and enjoyed a nice cheap meal of Lasagne.
We then visited the town hall, which was beautiful. There was a theatre that had seating upstairs which were very detailed individual velvet covered seats. The roof was pressed/stamped steel with intricate patterns. The whole building was very impressive. The war museum was temporarily in one of the rooms, as their building had been extensively damaged in the earthquake. Our next visit was to walk past Australia’s oldest working brothel. We could have done a tour however we had William with us and it would’ve been slightly inappropriate.
We grabbed some groceries and headed up to the lookout above what they call the Super Pit, which is a huge working Gold Mine right on the edge of town. It is also the site of where the township of Boulder used to be. It was at least 5 times bigger than the one at Coolgardie. Neil got chatting to a bloke who was staying in the same caravan park as us in Perth, who used to work in that mine. He said the mine company makes on average $80,000 to $90,000 per hour, and the mine runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. We could see the dump trucks coming up from the bottom and they looked like matchbox cars. There was a scoop up near the lookout that you could stand in; it would’ve been around 5m tall. We read that the machine it is attached to, a ‘face shovel’, is worth $10 million dollars. Its fuel tank holds 11,000 litres and its maximum speed is 2.14km/h. The mine owns 4 of them. Each scoop can hold up to 60 tonnes of rock, and the dump trucks that carry the rock can hold around 4 scoops.
We got back to the Caravan Park and to our surprise, Neil’s workmate Tony Ferguson is staying in the same park. We knew he was in Perth, but were very surprised to see him in Kalgoorlie. We had a slack dinner after having a big late lunch. William was very tired and didn’t take long to convince him it was bedtime.
We are going to try and get to the museum tomorrow morning and do a bit more sight-seeing. We’ll hopefully leave town around lunchtime and head towards Norseman; we’ll see how far we make it past there as we are hoping to stay in a free off road camping ground tomorrow night.