Hi Ho! Hi Ho!

Editor's Note: This is the first post in a three part series that chronicles my adventures to the great city of Kalgoorlie in the Goldfields of Western Australia.

First off, Kalgoorlie is a small city about 400-500 km East of Perth that is known for its prostitutes and mining. While I did explore the former, I got a very good taste of the latter. We left from Tommie More at 4 30 am on Friday to catch a 6 00 am flight out of Perth to Kalgoorlie. The great thing about this flight was that they actually served us a meal on a flight that only took an hour and fifteen minutes max... they treat us right here... Anyway, the first thing we did once we got there was really, really exciting. In fact, I'm just getting so excited about it that I can't even contain myself. This is what we did - We went up to the reservoir that holds the water for the city and looked out over the city. So Cool... And that's not all, apparently there's a pipeline that runs all the way to it from Perth carrying fresh water for these poor souls out in the bush-- I suppose I shouldn't call them poor because just about everybody is in the mining industry and making way too much money. That being said, I would personally rather have a little less money and be closer to civilization. And back to the pipeline, at the time it was built it was the longest freshwater pipeline in the world and an engineering feat. Maybe that still holds today, but I don't really know. There really isn't anything picture-worthy so far, but go ahead and read the plaque for yourself. After taking in the breathtaking view, we moved on to the "Superpit," the largest gold mine in Australia and the fourth or fifth biggest in the world. The Superpit is a massive gold mine just on the outskirts of Kalgoorlie that measures something like 2km x 4km and is very deep. You can see in the picture a truck carrying a bunch of rocks. These rocks are taken to be crushed up in order to get to the gold that is speckled throughout the rocks. The process used-something to do with anodes and cathodes and fun stuff like that-is capable of extracting something like 80% of the gold that is in the rocks, if I remember correctly. And what that comes down to is this, for each of the seven truckloads of rock that is brought out of the quarry, there is only about a golf ball sized portion of gold that is extracted. While that may sound ridiculous, with gold running at $1000/oz., it's not so bad after all. The specks on the ground in the bottom right corner of the photo are holes in the ground packed with many tons of explosives to expose new rock. They do about three of these each week and we missed this one by only a couple hours. For size reference, I added a green stick figure of me to the picture below on the far left hand side... These trucks were absolutely massive.From the Superpit we moved on to a museum and the Mining Hall of Fame, not to mention the world's tallest bin! Each of these activities were about as exciting as you could imagine them to be. We saw a gold pouring at the hall of fame... at least that's what we thought it was until the gold pouring man told us that it was just copper and nickel and other boring thinks like that. Then we went down into an old gold mine which was actually pretty fun. I mean, who doesn't love a good time 30m or so under the earth? It turns out that at one time there had been thirteen levels to this mine, but all but the top level has since flooded.Finally, at the end of it all, we returned to the school we were staying at and prepared a marvelous Aussie barbecue. When everyone had had their fill, we ended our night at the local horse races where I lost $5 betting on Lady Megagold.

**How well do you know me?**
In my fifth grade play of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, which dwarf did I portray with stunning accuracy?