FROM HERE TO KALGOORLIE

So we left you in Margaret River and headed south to the Valley of the Giants. The Valley of the Giants is in Walpole, a little, friendly country town with the biggest eucalypt trees in the world. These trees are 60-80mtrs high and up to 400yrs old,they are truly amazing to be in their presence.

You can take a drive through this incredible forest or do the treetop walk, we did both and it was good to get up close and personal. They really do look like they are something out of Lord of the Rings and going to grow legs. You really feel a special presence being around these enormous trees.

Can you believe they used to drive their cars through here in the 60's, until that particular tree died. No one knows why these particular trees grow here. The rest of Walpole is filled with green luscious hills of farming. The day we were there it was pretty miserable. But we haven't been blessed with the best weather lately, it has been incredibly windy, cold and rainy. The rest of the coastline is as you would expect, really rugged but beautiful.

Next we headed for Albany.  We stopped at a beautiful free camp site called Cosy Corner, right on the beach, 30 minutes outside of Albany.  We had been spotlighting most nights on our trip and had not seen anything but here got to see Quokkas, rabbits and a possum which the kids thought was cool. 

The Albany coastline was amazing but freezing and windy!  We visited the wind farm which produces 50% of Albany's energy giving it the "Greenest city in WA" label.  We also got to see whales breaching along the coastline.

All the information we had about Albany was raving about this Whale World, and the kids were all excited. We thought it was going to be filled with some great info about the whales in the area and had already seen a photo of the sperm whale skeleton on display. BOY, WERE WE IN FOR A SHOCK. Now I've read some other blogs raving about this place (obviously we thought differently) and we all thought this place was in really bad taste. It was all about the days of killing whales between 1954 - 1978.  We were taken to the boat ramp where you stood for 20 mins listening to an audio of them killing, cutting, sawing the whale apart. Yes, actual audio from that time. Then we were lucky enough to be taken to the top deck where they saw the head off and spear the blubber into the ovens under the deck.  But it gets even better, they actually take you down to the cookers and play another audio of them cooking the whale fat into oil. Now the greenie in me was disgusted, to say the least. Spencer said he felt sick, Scarlett was practically crying and Phoebe and Michael just wanted to get out of there.  I know that this was part of our history, but to be honest this place, to me, was glorifying this horrible act. A place to forget!!!

So onto Esperance, and what a nice beachy town.  It felt a bit like Kingscliff to us. The camp ground was opposite to the beach and we managed to pull the bikes down for a ride. So bitterly cold and windy here but did get into Cape Le Grande which is a great spot to see whales, a small accessible national park. Unfortunately we didn't see any. Now Esperance is home to Sammy the Seal, and the kids were pretty excited to catch him under the jetty, poor old Sammy though looked like he was on his last legs, think he was nearly ready to hang the old flipper up!!!!

Now we haven't stopped much over the last week it's been go,go,go,next stop on the the express trip was Kalgoorlie. I was always a bit curious about this place. It's a very old town with the remains of tho gold field homes everywhere. This is where they discovered gold, and still mine today with iron ore, bauxite,silver, copper,lithium and nickel. This is the tough man's town, we reckon you have to be pretty hard to live out here. This is home to the superpit, a working mine and the tour we did through Goldrush tours was fantastic.

It also incorporated a tour of the flying doctors which was very interesting. They have 6 planes here at a cost of 4 million dollars each and then $600 000 to revamp them. They come from Switzerland as a passenger plane and are then converted to the special needs of the medical staff. There are some photos of Spencer and Phoebe ringing for help in the olden days, they look worn out to me!!! I can't believe this service isn't fully funded by the government, they still have to do some heavy fundraising, and thankfully the mines have chipped in and bought 2 planes recently.  Michael was so cranky about this that he sent off an email to Kochie and Mel on Sunrise so stay tuned!

The super pit is really super big, these trucks look like little tonker trucks in the photos but are huge and you can see the kids in the super scooper. This place is run 24hrs and the truck drivers do 12 hr shifts and get paid about $1500 a week. All mines have contingency plans in place before they even start the mine, and have a conservation plan in place. So when the mine needs to be back filled they have the local flora and fauna already growing and can go straight onto the site. That includes all piping and cables need to be dug up after the mine is no longer needed. They are extending this pit so it's huge. The trucks generally know if they have hit gold by the weight of the truck and have listings of blast times everywhere. 4 blasts a week here!!!! I can't remember how much they make here but someone is getting very rich here. All the gold bullions go straight to Perth. Oh and if one of you guys were interested in a super big play toy one of these trucks will set you back $6 000 000 and just to show off even more the tyres alone are $25 000 each, and there are 6 of them and they only survive for 6 months.

The town itself looked a little weary as there was an earthquake here back in April so alot of the buildings have scaffolding and some have even been closed down. But the earthquake didn't seem to rock the foundations of the red light district. Prostitution is illegal in WA but they have this so called law called the containment law where you can have a brothel as long as it's near a police station and they are all in one street. These fine establishments have the girls on show in front of their doors ready to go 24hrs. The girls have a lovely oasis to live behind the fence where they have a pool and a massage therapist and an on call doctor service all at your fingertips. It is certainly another world here, where the pubs out do each other with half naked to fully naked bar staff called Skimpies!!!  How hygienic!!!Yes guys get excited BUT it is known that one of the prostitutes here is 80yrs old!!!! Ahh Kalgoorlie you are a rough old town. The madam is on the city council and the coach for the women's softball team and her name used to be Bruce!!!!

So until next time, we'll see you on the Nullarbor.