Photo Recap – Kalgoorlie and the Super Pit

About an hour after passing the derailment site, the Indian Pacific slides to a gentle stop at the station in Kalgoorlie. This has been a mining town since 1893 when gold was discovered. Until recently when the prices fell, nickel was also being mined. We’ll be here for just about two hours – time enough for a bus tour of the town.

In many way, Kalgoorlie still has the feel of a boom town. Many of the buildings are evocative of a much earlier era – this is one of several hotels reminiscent of Victorian times – and there are even three operating legal brothels. (Two of the working girls waved cheerfully as we drove slowly passed one of the houses, prompting our bus driver to recall rather mournfully that there were more than 40 such establishments in Kalgoorlie’s heyday.)

The town’s major tourist attraction is — no, not the brothels — the Super Pit, where gold is mined using “open cut” techniques. There is an estimated 8-9 years of life left in the pit, which is now nearly 1000 feet deep. See the headlights on those tiny little trucks down there? Each one of those trucks can transport 220 tons of crushed rock and it takes six truckloads to yield a golf-ball-size piece of pure gold. (My apologies for the slight blur to the photo. It was nearly dark when I took it and I had no tripod to steady the camera.)

This will help put the scale into perspective: It’s a tire for one of those monster trucks. According to our guide, each tire costs more than $20,000.

And this is one of the buckets used to scoop up the crushed rock and dump it into one of those trucks. Like the pit itself, all the equipment used here is massive.

By 10:30, all passengers have returned to the Indian Pacific for our third and last night aboard. Our final stretch run … another 375 miles or so westward … will terminate in Perth on the shores of the Indian Ocean just after breakfast. (I was traveling alone in a two-person compartment, but lowered the upper berth for purposes of this photo.)

Tomorrow: Perth and the port of Freemantle