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Published: August 31st 2012
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Day 59 – Monday 27
th August – Boondi Rock to Lucky Bay, Cape Le Grand National Park
It was another sunny, blue sky morning as we departed our little campsite. We spent about 15 minutes clearing the fly thingies out of all the nooks and crannies in the tent and the kilos of flies that committed suicide in the trailer sink. Yuk. On the road again we made a very brief stop at Calgardie, once the third most important town in Western Australia in the time of the gold rush in the late 1800’s. Unfortunately we don’t have the time to explore the Goldfields Historical trail so will have to come back here.
40kms further on is Kalgoorlie-Boulder, home of the world’s largest open cut gold mine. Around Kalgoorlie there used to be lots of individual gold mines mining gold via shafts. Over the years these have been amalgamated into one giant open cut gold mine to benefit from economies of scale. We drove up to the viewing platform for the superpit to see the size of the thing. It is 3.5km long, 1.6km wide and over 350m deep. The giant caterpillar trucks that move the blasted
rocks away from the face look like tiny Tonka toys against the backdrop of the huge mine pit. These trucks cost $4 million a pop and can transport 225 tonnes of rock (max speed 55kmh, according to Luke). The face shovel machines cost $10 million each. There are four of these in the superpit. As we were standing watching the action below, a siren sounded and a voice over the tannoy announced a blast would take place in 3 minutes. Talk about good timing because apparently there are only 3 – 4 blasts happening a week. Right under our noses we felt a rumble, heard a huge explosion and then seconds later saw dust rising from the blast sight to our right. So without taking a tour of the mine we got to see quite a lot of action from the viewing platform.
After a short wander through town (Mark was disappointed we had no time to go on one of the brothel tours in Kalgoorlie) we got back in the car and headed south towards Esperance and Cape Le Grand National Park. We drove pretty much non-stop until we got to a little town called Gibson, 20kms from
Esperance. Stopped just long enough to take photos of the Gibson town and pub signs in honour of my maiden name arrived at our destination at 3.45pm. The blue skies of the morning had been replaced by angry looking clouds, spitting rain and the temperature had dropped to 14 degrees. Brrrr. We had a quick drive west along the coast at Esperance to see Twilight Beach (Australia’s favourite beach in 2006, apparently) and the famously stunning coastline, then headed East for the 60km drive into Cape Le Grand National Park. The cool air, dark grey skies and wind made the beautiful coast less impressive than normal, but we could see what a fantastic place Esperance would be in the sunshine and warmer weather.
We arrived at Lucky Bay in the National Park just before sunset, although there wasn’t much of the sun to be seen behind the clouds. The campsite is nice and sheltered from the wind and has proper flushing toilets, a camp kitchen and solar heated showers. But given the lack of sunshine and the cold air temperatures we weren’t likely to be taking a shower. Once again we popped up the tent just before it got
dark. But this time the kids said they wanted to do it themselves, all on their own. We let them do what they could while having a well earned beer (Mark had earned the beer for all the day’s driving) before their lack of height and strength stopped their efforts and they needed grown up help. Dinner was chilli I’d cooked up the night before with rice and corn chips. A kangaroo mum with her joey in her pouch was observing us with interest from right by the tent as we ate. We will check out the beach at Lucky Bay in the morning when it is light. Lucky Bay’s claim to fame is that it has the whitest sand in Australia…
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