“Life In The So-Called Space Age”
We drove to the city of Wagga Wagga yesterday via Albury for lunch. This means we’re now in the state of New South Wales!
Our hotel is attached to the local RSL club, which means pokies are only a hop and a skip away. Bernard’s still up from a big win in Melbourne and after a bit of fluttering yesterday he ended up (again) with a slight net profit!
We didn’t do any tourist activities yesterday – just drove and relaxed – but these next two days have potentially full schedules. Stay tuned…
Ballarat was the epicentre of the Australian gold rush of the 1800s, and fortunes were made in those Victorian hills. Yesterday we visited an open-air museum called Sovereign Hill that gives an idea of life in the gold-mining towns in those days.
The park features a couple of ‘mines’ and a dig for gold panning, all adjacent to a simulated main street from the period. Employees in costume wander around and occasionally do performances (we watched a ‘wife auction’) and visitors can just wander around and explore as they like. I’m sure Australian readers know about this place (since it’s a major tourist attraction) but to Americans this is like a (permanent) 1800s renaissance fair.
Several of the stores featured tradesmen that manufactured the articles they sold. A few of these workshops featured flabbergastingly elaborate belt-driven machines all powered by a single engine and giant belts (some dozens of meters in circumference) stretching up to the rafters and across the rooms!
We did a self-guided mine tour that took us underground and utilized sound, lights and special effects similar to what I’ve seen at Disney. It was great but unfortunately we didn’t have the time to do the bigger and longer versions. There was also a fancy ‘old photo’ studio that would have been fun and a separate ‘history of gold’ museum that could have filled a day itself. We certainly could have spent more time there.
For me though the highlight of the day was gold-panning. As with many things, I’m an expert at this esoteric method of goldfinding and despite Bernard’s skepticism knew I’d not only find gold but also had a decent chance of striking it rich!
And – of course – I was right. Here’s the nugget I found after only minutes of expert-level sloshing and searching:
Now the killjoys out there are going to say something like “But that’s only 0.5 square mm of gold!!!” and “If a Troy ounce can be beaten to 8 square meters of gold leaf then that’s worth only $0.00009!!” but I look at this as an important first step to riches, and validation of my prospecting skills.
It’s a shame Bernard – only seconds after this photo was taken – hurled the nugget down onto the ground, never to be seen again. All that value, now literally lies in the dusts of Sovereign Hill in Ballarat.
Yesterday we left Melbourne and drove southwest toward a natural tourist attraction called The Twelve Apostles. This was a drive through endless dry, yellow fields of sheep and cows interspersed by eucalypts.
We didn’t see any (living) kangaroos, but at one time had to stop for an echidna crossing the road!
The drive took a few hours and eventually we arrived at the destination. Although it’s somewhat remote it was very busy (even on New Year’s Eve!) and mobbed with tourists. And here’s what we came to see:
There were twelve rock formations originally, but many have crumbled and only a few are still visible above the water. The top photo looks west, the bottom east.
The ocean itself was the bigger attraction for me: that’s (arguably) the Southern Ocean which has always been somewhat mysterious and exotic in my mind. Monsters live there, and only madmen dare to sail it.
The winds blowing up from Antarctica were cyclonic and inflated our windbreakers admirably, but it wasn’t exactly cold and out of the wind we even got a bit overheated. A path led us down to a beach (behind and east of where the above photo was taken) where I was able to dip my feet into the ocean…
It was cold! Though it’s farther than the horizon, from this point on Australia the next stop south is Antarctica and the ocean was giving me a hint of what to expect!
We continued to Ballarat where almost everything was closed (it was evening on New Year’s Eve and a Sunday…) so we were forced to enjoy McDonalds, which turned out to be as delicious as it had been for lunch seven hours earlier 😉
Oh and the new year? I welcomed it fast asleep!