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Published: April 9th 2009
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Today we drove, and drove and drove! We are now in Kalgoorlie which is about 600km west of Perth. Once we had left Fremantle it was a long straight road all the way! I am sure we did not turn for at least 6 hours. The roads are so quiet that you barely pass any traffic. There were quite a lot of road trains (giant lorries with 3 trailers) but the novelty of them was beginning to wear a bit thin towards the end.
There were a few things along the way to distract us. We passed a museum that was shaped like a giant SLR camera. The museum seem to have shut up shop which didn't surprise me too much as we were miles from anywhere. Due to my love of photo taking I obviously had to pose outside it and have my photograph taken.
We passed/drove next to a very long water pipe. I know it sounds a bit dull but it is a very impressive feat of engineering. The water in Kalgoorlie is piped all the way from the outskirts of Perth. That is a distance of 530km and it is uphill. I think it was
completed over 100 years ago when the goldrush meant the population of Kalgoorlie suddenly increased.
We also saw the rabbit proof fence. As the name suggests it is a fence to keep rabbits out of Western Australia. I am not sure how successful it is but apparently every 10 years or so emus migrate it huge numbers and it halts their migration. Up to 40,000 of them get stuck along the fence. That is a lot of emus.
When we finally reached Kalgoorlie we went to see the Super Pit. The Super Pit is a big, and I mean big, hole in the ground. (It is an open cast gold mine). It is 3.4km long, 1.45km wide and over 440km deep and it isn't finished yet. They will keep mining here until 2017 when the pit will be a lot bigger. It was impossible to take in how big the Super pit really was. There were lots of trucks driving around it and they looked quite small. It is only when we looked at the pictures of miners standing next to them and we stood next to the tyres that you realise that the trucks are huge.
Everyday or two they carry out controlled blasts in the Super Pit. All the rubble that is generated is then taken out of the pits by the big trucks before being processed to remove the gold. Being a truck driver must be dull job. In a 12 hour shift they only remove 18 loads as the trucks travel at low speeds. I believe that is pretty well paid though.
We were lucky that a blast was planned for about 10 minutes after we arrived. We were able to watch them (with binoculars) setting up before there was the actual blast. The blast made you realise how far away they were and how slowly sounds travels. There was quite a lot of dust visible and about half the explosions had gone off before we could hear anything.
Tomorrow we are going to explore Kalgoorlie further.
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440km deep?
That's a deep pit.