Day 7 - Emerald to Barcaldine

Today I found a bit hard to get up. Controlling a motorbike, and a big and heavy one like that, is quite exhausting. I feel as if I had been going to a gym every day for several hours. Every muscle in my body aches. I keep telling myself that this is good for me.

Anyway, I finally pulled up the tent, made myself a chai tea and left to visit the huge dam that is near Emerald.

Getting ready to start the day

I am sorry, I cannot remember the name of this dam



Another view of the dam itself, the lake is huge and beautiful



A really nice stretch of road to get to the dam

The 'honest system' works. People just grab what they want and leave the money in the box. This helps me believe that human nature is ultimately good.



Amazingly, this sign is on the EXIT of Emerald

 On the way west, there is a nice little town called Rubyvale, it's a miner's town, people claim small sections of land or buy a lease to an existing claim. Then they spend their lives digging around their claim, hoping to find sapphires, rubys, diamonds and other precious or semi-precious stones.

Visiting one of the mines

Apparently a volcano erupted here a few millions of years ago and then a river formed, where a lot of precious stones gathered around iron rocks that had been thrown by the volcano. Then the river bed was covered by mud, sand, etc. What the miners have to do is dig until they get to the clay river bed and then follow that, looking for the iron rocks and when they find one, then look around it and that's how they find them. The catch is that the ancient river bed can be about 7 metres below the surface.

A very nice hotel in Rubyvale, It comes with chickens included, look above.



This is what people like to do in the 38degC heat in Australia. Do you want to come fossicking with me?

No kidding, this is considered hot where I come from.

On the road to Barcaldine I had an incident.

I was driving behind one of those 'road trains', with the sun in my eyes, at about 4PM. Since I left Rockhampton I have been driving west, so I have the full sun in my face after midday.

The sun here is incredibly bright, I have been wearing my dark helmet visor and the polarised sunnies inside the helmet, and even then , even with the little awning that I installed on top of the visor, it still hurts of how bright it is.

Anyway, back to the road train. I was behind it and I was about to overtake it. I had a look and there were no cars coming in the opposite direction, so I commenced to overtake. However, just before I passed the truck, something told me to stop and that I am not really in a hurry, so I pulled back behind the truck again.

At that instant, a black car that was coming in the opposite direction went pass me. I had a chill, as I had not seen this car and if I had overtaken the truck I would have surely planted myself right in front of an oncoming vehicle coming a high speed.

The reason I did not see this vehicle is because it was black, the road is black, I had the low sun in my eyes and I was wearing 2 sunglasses.

Do you believe in angels? The movie 'City of Angels' (Nicholas Cage and Meg Ryan) comes to my mind, I remember a scene where the angels stop people from suffering accidents by putting their hands on their shoulders and making they change their actions. I can only guess that this is what happened to me today. I cannot fathom another explanation to why I didn't continue overtaking that truck.

In any case, now the risk manager in me comes into operation. I stopped using the 2 sunnies together, and from now on, if I decide to overtake a truck, I take it off and I look first with my naked eye to make sure I can see all the colours. Since I do this, it's been fine.




Maybe this angel helped me...

Arrived in Barcaldine and shared a meal with 4 very nice people from Victoria. From left to right, Lindsay, Trevor (his brother) Helen and Sandy.

Day 6 - Mount Morgan (Leichhardt Hotel and Mine) to Emerald

This morning I booked into a tour to visit the mine that helped create the town of Mount Morgan. In fact the 'actual' Mount Morgan doesn't exist anymore. It was completely removed during the mining process and these days, where Mount Morgan used to be, there is a humongous hole that is now filled with acid water.

Here is the hole where Mount Morgan used to be... The one on the left...

I had a chance to sit at the gigantic desk of the Managing Director of the mine. It's funny how the desks used to get bigger to indicate status. This is the biggest one I've seen so far. It didn't even fit into the photo.

The next caption is in conmemoration of something that I find very strange. The miners had a period of rest (call it morning tea). When they came out of the mine to rest, there were all these children waiting for them; the miners gave them their billy cans (the ones usually used to carry food or water) and asked them to go to the  pub and get them some beer. So the children would run through the Cutter Lane to the closest pub, fill up the Billy can with beer and bring it to the miners, for a coin I suppose.

So, over the years, 'running the cutter' became an annual race and a town festival.

In remembrance of the Cutter Lane children

My friend Andrew Adam at the Leichhardt Hotel, with Sandy, the store manager.

Here we are, in front of the Leichhardt, if you ever go past Mount Morgan, I recommend it, great food, great people.

On the way to Emerald, my first encounter with a Road Train, scary things, and this is only a small one.

Finally arrived at Emerald at 7.30PM, unfortunately ended up travelling at night (again). It's hard to calculate travel times when there is so much work on the roads; there were many sections closed and others at a 40kmh max.

I met a nice bunch of people at the camping in Emerald, they gave me lots of tips for the rest of the trip

Resident possum at the camping, looking for a handout