Today is my first and last Internet for quite a while. We have driven 3000km in three days, across the huge Nullarbor Plain.....literally no trees for several hundreds of kilometres, and the desert meets the sea in an amazing coastline of giant jagged red and yellow cliffs for over 2000 km. It is a wild and exhilarating journey, where one has to watch out for kangaroos, feral camels, wombats and emus. corpses litter the roadsides. We came across a dreadful spot where a giant road train...they can be up to 50meters long, and are loaded with hundreds of tonnes of mining machinery....this one crashed directly into a herd of feral camels and the roadside was littered with camel corpses, the road a red streak for about 1 kilometre. Horrible! One drives with special concentration in these circumstances. As it is winter is is fairly OK, but in summer across the Nullarbor the temperatures are in the high 40 s and 50s.
Geologically Australia is very old, and this area has giant gold mines...there was a gold rush to this area in the centre of the desert in the 1880s...with the rise in gold prices, the dozens of small mines are viable again, but in Kalgoorlie, one entrepreneur bought all the licences In the 1980 s and created the world's largest open cut gold mine, which has produced 500million ounces of gold. The trucks in the mine are $10million each and carry a load of 250 tonnes of ore...the size of one scoop from the giant excavators. It is quite awe inspiring to see the size of all this!