Been a bit of a while since I last posted so there’s quite a bit to catch up on, but we’ve not been up to much the past week so that cuts down the reading/writing a little bit :-)
The last post left off with us arriving in Esperance – a small town on the Southern Coast of WA. We stayed there 3 nights and explored the wonderful unspoilt scenery around Cape Le Grand National Park with Australia’s best beaches apparently. The sand was like flour and ridiculously white and the sea clear turquoise blue. Beaches don’t get much better than that!
From Esperance we headed directly north to gold mine country, Kalgoorlie-Boulder - 500km of looking at this:
We got excited by the bends in the road and signposts. Luckily the van had calmed down after it’s hissy fit in Albany so we made it to Kalgoorlie in one long, hot, sweaty day stopping at garages for ice-creams and drinks. We spent the night in a nice caravan park complete with swimming pool – after the day in the car the pool was the best!
Kalgoorlie is a centre for gold mining in WA and looks like it should be in Nevada somewhere.
We spent the following day exploring the town and visited the museum to learn how they get gold out of the rocks they blast out of the ground, and then visited the super pit where they get the rocks from. I knew the pit was gonna be big (hence the ‘super’) but it was ENORMOUS! Can’t remember any of the stats but the massive trucks used looked like toy trucks at the bottom of the pit. We timed it just right to see them blow up some rock which was pretty cool and made a good bang:
We also visited an old abandoned mine turned into tourist attraction and got to don very attractive safety helmets and squeeze 4 at a time into the lift down to the mine. An ex-miner gave us the lowdown on gold mining and then we got to see some melted gold poured and turned into a gold bar – unfortunately it was fools gold or we would have run out of there with our pockets laden with gold! We definitely made the most of being in gold country, but my panning attempts didn’t allow us to leave richer than we came… :-(
We spent that night in a rest-stop the middle of nowhere – about 100km west of Kalgoorlie. Was great to not pay for a campsite, and the noises and clear skies of stars were so worth not having any facilities (well, we had a picnic table…). Never seen so many but couldn’t recognise many of the odd southern hemisphere constellations.
We then had another 500km of straight roads through the bush to get back to Perth and return our van. We made an unplanned detour through the Swan Valley – touristy wine country just outside Perth. We had no dramas returning the van and they thankfully refunded all our deposit even though we’d lost a plate somewhere along our 3000km journey.
Map to sort of show our route:
From Perth, we hopped on a swanky Qantas plane (it seemed swanky after cheapo JetStar and Tiger) to Sydney where we spent 4 nights in hostels in central Sydney. We did some touristy bits and pieces and lots of walking around the city. Of course we now have numerous photos of the Opera House and Harbour Bridge at various times of day:
We also spent a lovely afternoon/evening with Kellie and Elissa – Sydney-ites who we met on our South East Asia tour. Was great to hang out with friends again who know us and we don’t just spend time talking about where we’ve been and where we’re going – the normal travellers conversations!
After 4 nights cursing the annoying 18 year old backpackers who think it’s perfectly acceptable to eat McDonalds and chat in German very loudly in the corridor at 3am, we decided that we needed to stay somewhere cheaper and nicer! So we found a lovely spacious room in a shared house in Coogee – a 30 min bus ride to the city but a 2 minute walk to the beach :-) We’re giving ourselves 3 weeks staying put to unpack the bags (so so nice to live out of drawers again…) and see if getting jobs in Austalia is a feasible possibility at the moment as we’re both quite liking the beachy/outdoorsy lifestyle that Oz can bring.
Since we’ve been in Coogee, we done a lot of nothing, chatting with our housemates, touristy trips into the city and exploring the coast. On Sunday, we joined the locals and did the Coogee-Bondi clifftop walk which is a pretty spectacular 8km walk:
So we’ll be in Sydney for another week and a bit, and depending on the employment situation, we may be exploring the East coast a bit more or staying a bit longer… as usual, we have no plans! Just enjoying feeling like we’re living somewhere for the first time in 5 months!
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