And no Pauline, it wasn’t a late birthday gift😀
Kerry and David arrived at Kalgoorlie a couple of days before me, so I set them a mission of booking us onto a town tour that gave us a good overview of Kalgoorlie and it’s history. My only criteria was that I didn’t want to end up underground in a mine. Live and learn. The brothel tour was led by the 85 year old madam. She started by complaining about how day light saving was the greatest curse on earth, and it went downhill from there. Seriously downhill – until we ended up in the red and black “hit me” bedroom and watched her flogging a stuffed teddy bear with a black flogger. Sorry, no photos taken. Much wine required to get over the trauma last night.
Our morning tour was much more what I had in mind. A tram tour which took us around town with a few stopovers at key points including the gold mine which is right on the edge of town.
The town pretty much has a pub on every corner and they are beautiful old buildings. We’ve checked a couple out. I stopped at Coolgardie on the way into town. It’s just down the road and, in its hay day as a gold mining town was the 3rd largest city in WA with a population of 10,000, 2 stock exchanges and 26 pubs. When the water pipeline arrived at Kalgoorlie, everyone moved there. So Coolgardie is now a small town with about 1000 people, but lots of terrific historical buildings.
Kalgoorlie is mostly dirt as expected. The little amount of grass and foliage around is surprisingly green. They’ve obviously shared in the rain. The temperature was 36 degrees when I arrived Thursday afternoon. So straight to the pool for a swim. Friday and then today low 20’s so nice exploring weather. Today I wandered down the road to the local races. I thought this would be a big event, but there was hardly anyone there. Good fun though, and I picked the grey for mum on my first race and won $50 so no complaints
Heading west tomorrow and then I’ll start working my way up the coast from Perth. I farewelled Kerry and David today as they headed off towards Perth and then south to Margaret River.
Round about 