Kalgoorlie

Kalgoorlie was awesome! Big trucks, big diggers, big holes, big pipelines! (You may have gathered already that Rebecca isn't writing this description 😊 )

Kalgoorlie is an iconic old gold mining town. It has gone from thousands of prospectors descending on it in a gold rush, to one of the largest gold mines, and holes, in the world.

The result is not exactly picturesque, but it is quite fascinating. Some random points of interest:

- There were many beautiful old pubs and other buildings
- There were many goldmines dug over the years, some of them are in the town and fenced off so people don't fall in
- An Australian billionaire (Alan Bond) was the impetus to combining all the mine rights into a single entity and digging a huge open pit mine instead
- Many early miners simply died of thirst as they were from places like Ireland and they had no concept of a place with no water
- Water was brought in on camel train, now it is pumped in through a 566 km pipeline from Perth!
- The main street is so wide to allow a camel train to do a U turn
- Out of 6 huge truck loads, 5 are just waste rock, and the one with gold ore has a total of a golf ball sized amount of gold

On our second last day there were some big storms which caused a power outage, which turned out to be quite severe. We spent a very hot night (28 deg) and next morning the entire town had no power, mobile or internet. And hence no shops, petrol, or even Google maps! And it was going to be 42 deg!

Thankfully we were leaving that day, and filled up with fuel the day before. So we got out and to Esperance OK, but it turned out to be a multi-day fiasco for Kalgoorlie, worst in 30 years apparently.Read more