Issue 5 April 2018
Brodie’s next 15,000 klm
On th e road again
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Trusting google when we left Wave Rock we suddenly realised we were heading further west than we expected, evidently google thought we would only drive on tar roads not dirt. Fortunately a local gave us directions for the shorter route ...”Just go straight ahead and you will probably see a sign to Southern Cross Just follow it” With explicit instructions we couldn’t go wrong. After a lot of dust we finally arrived in Kalgoorlie around 3pm on a Saturday afternoon ...Kalgoorlie closes at 2pm on a Saturday and reopens 8am Monday! No real problem, we found the free camp, set up for the night and made plans to visit the ghost towns on the way to Leonora tomorrow.
Kalgoorlie
The town hall and a couple of the many pubs
Unique to Kalgoorlie one of brothels in WA and it runs to
f the oldest ours
and with so many single men in the mines the ideal setup, Maccas and a brothel on opposite corners!
Maybe it would h e l p t h e pension go further.
2 Hours in a Bro
The brothel offered tours of it’s establishment, $20 per person for old people. Obviously we did it and had a few laughs, I got the impression that it wasn’t a really successful brothel as the madam (bottom right hand corner) admitted she didn’t have any girls at the moment. There were 16 people on our tour and that was the second tour of the day so approx $700 per day 6 -7 days a week you probably don’t need to lay down on the job. The tour consisted of the madam talking about the business and her experiences, although it wasn’t really risque, one elderly lady, who had been brought along by her daughter, was embarrassed and uncomfortable with the whole thing. Evidently an hour with one of the girls was $280 .... I’m to much of a cheap skate to know if that was good value lol
othel for $20
The bondage workbench
Heading to Leanora we made a slight detour (102ks) to Lake Ballard. Lake Ballard is a huge salt lake that someone has scattered these cast sculptures, on the lake. Being lazy we walked to the ďŹ rst one and sent the drone to look at the others, they all appeared fairly similar so that saved a lot of walking. The dust plume on the cover came from our drive out there although it was only 30ks of dirt.
Lake Ballard
We called into the first “ghost town” Kookynie, very few of the buildings still exist but there were plaques with old photos, .. but the old hotel was the highlight of the site. First you had to push past the horse to get in the pub, the horse comes to the pub every day and stands across the door hoping visitors will feed it carrots, (it was even there at 7.45am the next day well before the pub opened. Once inside the pub, we were greeted by a typical 1920s type pub ... I think the barmaid was also that vintage .. Jan has been converted to Swan Lager ...goodbye XXXX.
The Bar
The rooms
Pub Food
Niaga
What a great free camp, way out in the middle of no where. We thought the toilet was a bonus as at first glance it was a flushing toilet, unfortunately it seems you have to carry a metal bucket back from the creek to fill up the cistern .... we decided it was time to fully utilised the motorhome toilet!!! An early start saw us on the way to Leomora.
ara Dam
Gawlia V Ninety percent of the houses in this photo are empty and derelict, they are part of the “living ghost town� that have escaped demolition when everyone moved out due to a downturn in gold prices (years ago!) They are now part of a tourist experience.
Village
Gawlia V
Village
Gawlia
a Village
The Superpit Ka one of the largest in
The tour of the Superpit was well worth while, the pit is 3.5 klm long, 1.5 wide and over 600 metres deep. Unfortunately the tour couldn’t go onto the haul roads due to the danger of getting in the way of one of the trucks, but we were still able to observe the loadings etc.
erpit Kalgoorlie argest in the world.
,
ble
This was captured at the bottom of the pit, each scoop holds 80 tons and the truck takes 3. It will take the truck about 45mins to get to where it will dump its load and about 15 mins to get back down again.
The Caterpillar truck, with 240 tonnes of ore, each tyre costs about $40,000 each and last around 6 months, they use about 180 litres of diesel an hour, (the Fiat motorhome at normal cruise uses 14 litres an hour) mainly driven by women as they are easy on the gear and they run non stop 24 hours a day.
The Komatsu loader weighs 750 tonnes can travel at a maximum speed of 2.4 klph and takes between 12 and 14 hours to travel from the bottom of the pit to the top
The Kalgoorlie free camp, no photo it was next to an airport) had a 24 limit, as we were staying for the gold prospector course we moved closer to tomorrows event, Every surface of the pub had been written on by visitors etc as a form of decoration .... chips were $8.50 .. but they were pretty good.
The Broad A 38k north o
our home for free if you ma I bough
Arrow Tavern of Kalgoorlie
r the night, it is ake a purchase ght chips!
We met Marty at his front gate and followed for several klms to his campsite. After the introductions and damper and billy tea we were given a rundown on how to use metal detectors. Jan used one of Marty’s while I tried to learn to use ours. Although we were told when we bought it it wasn’t the best for gold I was disappointed when it wouldn’t detect a nugget buried 150mm deep that Marty had placed there. Demo over, Jan headed off with her detector to look for gold, there was one other on the tour so Marty devoted his time giving personal instruction to them both, we hadn’t paid for two detectors so I just wandered around and chatted to Marty. After lunch with no gold found we went to another area and Marty brought me a detector, but even with the three of us covering a lot of ground we only managed to find bullets, tin and other rubbish.... some our forebears were just as big as grubs with rubbish as the grubs of today.
PICK YOUR RUBBISH UP!!
Gold Nug
uggets Tour
Marty hiding a piece of gold so we could learn how to ďŹ nd it! Didn’t help!
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