Canning Stock Route 2004

Tuesday 17th August.

We packed up and left camp about 7.15 am and our first stop was at Cocklebiddy Cave. Colin, Ann, Warren, Alan and Val all went exploring. At the top of the cave entrance there is a vertical ladder and then a scramble, slide or climb over the rocks till you reach pitch black. Colin and Warren went far enough to find water in the cave. It was crystal clear and perfectly still, so Colin didn't see it. The first he knew of it was when his shoes and socks got suddenly wet. The Cave is about 10km west of Cocklebiddy and about 12 km north of the highway. Continuing west along Eyre Highway, which crosses the Nullarbor Plain, we reached the longest straight road in Australia being 90 miles or 146.4 km long from Caiguna without a single bend. Road trains up to 36.5 m long travel this route and there are emergency RFDS landing strips marked on the road up to 1.2 km long. Our journey continued on to Norseman and then on to Kalgoorlie. We stayed at the Prospector Caravan Park, which had a TV in the camp kitchen, so we caught up a little on Olympic games viewing. 

Wednesday 18th August.

 Everyone was doing their own thing today. Our first job was to find someone to replace the dead CD player in our car. We managed to find help and booked it in for later in the day. We went to have an overall look at the town from the Mt Charlotte Lookout where the reservoir is for Kalgoorlie. Next stop was the Super Pit Lookout. After heading  back into  town to drop the car off, we  walked  the length of

Hannan St and had some lunch. We also stocked up on supplies (about 2 weeks worth) as this was our last chance to go to a supermarket. After picking up the car (complete with a new CD player), we headed off to the Super Pit again for the "big bang". Well we did see a small puff of dust rise. Everything out here is big. The pit is 3 km long, 1.5 km wide and 330 m deep at this stage. In every 8 tonnes of dirt removed there is 7 tonnes of rubbish, 1 tonne of ore bearing dirt and the yield is about 1g of gold. The most expensive vehicle on site cost $9 million, the largest capacity vehicle can carry 320 tonnes and the largest fuel tank carries 4641 litres. There was guy at the Super Pit viewing area who worked there and made the visit very interesting for us with his the information. He also answered questions for us. At night, at the caravan park, we met a French family of the parents and two teenage daughters who had travelled extensively in outback Australia over several visits. We talked for a long time with them. The girls had a lot of very good photos on computer.

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