Koroit Opal Mine

Last week Bob and Deli took Carlotta and I to an opal mine in Koroit. We went to a mine owned by a lady that lives in town named Lyn who I got drunk before Christmas. She was talking about it and I naturally invited myself out for a visit and she agreed to let us have a look. Her husband and her do open mining there meaning they don't go underground at all in caves. There are some around town that do have underground mines though. It was so cool to go see that. They showed us the whole process of what they do. We dug some gravel up, went through it searching for stones that sounded like they could have opals in them. Then when after you've picked out the rocks, you break them up with a hammer and see if they're good or not. If they're good then they move onto the next stage which is washing and polishing them.

Lyn and Richard live there in the winters and do all their mining while its cooler outside. They made a house there and half of it is a trailer. It's pretty cool and creative. They were so nice to us. They were both so proud of everything they had done on their property and were happy to show us everything! It was a really cool trip. We got to look through a pile of potch, rocks with bits of opal in them, and were able to take home some of them.

Other than the opal mine field trip I've been keeping busy, working at the pub and the Bp quite a bit last week. It's been pretty quite here since the holidays, people spent all their money for Christmas and on New Years and the grape pickers have finally left!

The weather has been so hot here that you can't go outside for too long. It's well over the 100s everyday. There have been a lot of problems with bush fires all over, NSW and Tasmania especially. It's all over the news everyday. There was a big fire here last week at the council that burned down the whole new big building costing around 6million they reckon. It was huge, they had to evacuate a few streets here for a while.

I'm getting ready for my big road trip with Carlotta, my fellow backpacker German friend. We're heading out on the 20th and have pretty much everything sorted out for it. It's going to be so fun. I'll try to do another post before I leave explaining our route and such!