August 17th to 21st: Tom's Trip to Kalgoorlie

Purpose built Two-up gambling hall

Betting on the local game, "Two-up"

The inside of a Flying Doctors plane is outfitted like an
intensive care bed at a hospital

The Super Pit gold mine is one of the biggest open-pit mines in the world.
It is 6km long, 3km wide, and almost 1 km deep and growing!

See the dumptruck descending into the Super Pit?
The speck behind it is a Ford F250.

Gold fever

Tom left us for four days to head off to the "Wild West" of Australia - Kalgoorlie. They mine for gold there and you can still head off into the bush to try to find your own gold nugget or two. Tom didn't come home with any nuggets to fund our early retirement but he did have an interesting experience there. Along with some of the other teachers on exchange, he got to tour some of the establishments that put Kalgoorlie on the map. I will pass it over to him to share some details...
East of Perth some eight hours drive: red dirt, flies, desert and gold. Kalgoorlie is a frontier town founded on mining and is the last town of any size before you arrive at the true Outback. Desert to the east, desert to the north and desert to the south. Kalgoorlie itself gets all its fresh water pumped via pipeline from Perth. Although it receives four inches of rain a year, the evaporation rate is upwards of 85 inches a year, which means that year-round surface water does not exist. There is a massive aquifer under Kalgoorlie, but it's filled with water eight times saltier than the ocean. We went there to get a taste of the challenges of frontier living.

Turns out parking this baby is not as hard as you may think.
Since buying it, I have never been towed.

$500,000.00 worth of the "colour"

Local desert denizens

 While there we toured the School of the Air, a correspondence school built to service the needs of indigenous and non-indigenous children who live too remotely to have access to a traditional school. We listened in while the teachers taught Indonesian over the internet and by CB radio to those who were out on the land. We also visited an Aboriginal school where many of the students are transient. They may come for a couple of days, a couple of weeks, and sometimes even a couple of months before evaporating back to traditional homelands. We checked out one of the Flying Doctors' outposts where four doctors and four pilots provide medical services over a squillion square kilometers of desert, and went underground to experience life at a mine site. Prospectors and locals are still finding surface gold and as recently as 1995 an 895-ounze nugget was found sitting on the dirt within 30 kilometers town. In our leisure time we had a chance to taste a fine Australian drink called "beer" at a couple of saloons complete with skimpily-clad servers. Friday night we got an escorted tour of Lilly Langtree's brothel, one of three in town. There was a cricket room filled with cricket paraphernalia donated by a number of famous randy batsmen and bowlers, a boxing ring with a bed in the middle, a Roman orgy room, and a race car with a bed whose windshield wipers would swing whenever passionate sounds got above a certain decibel. The madam and a couple of the ladies answered all kinds of racy questions and the place seemed to be thriving. At $350/hour it was clear that miners get lonely and have more than two coins to rub together. All in all Kalgoorlie was an interesting place, but the surfing sucked.

An old time prospector's cabin

Pouring gold.