Townsville to Emerald

Great news! I (Janice) have a new granddaughter, Madison Lee born last Friday in Newcastle.  She was two weeks early, but she’s doing wonderfully well & so is Krissy.  We will see her in about 4 weeks. Picture below.

 

We are now leaving the coast and travelling inland. One of the first things you notice is the vast distances between habitats. This is now the dry time of year and there are hundreds of dried up river beds and many of the large rivers have little flow. This riverbed on the approach to Charters Towers has little water.

Charters Towers is an old goldmining town and at one time was the second largest city in Queensland next to Brisbane. It has many heritage buildings like the bank shown below.
 

We visited many goldmining sites in Charters Towers and Ravenswood. Below are the remains of an open cut mine (they are now mining underground) and an old miner’s cottage.
 

Nearby we discovered a landmark know as White Blow which is a large lump of white quartz about 10 metres high which was forced out of the ground millions of years ago.

 
We spent two days in Charters Towers before moving south towards Emerald. The distance was too far to travel in one day so we planned to stop overnight about half way there. We left CT on the Great Inland Way and the only civilisation we saw in 400 kilometres was the roadhouse at Belyando Crossing which was too close to CT to stop for the night so we continued on until we reached Clermont. This is the longest section we have driven on our trip so far, just over 400 kms. The road was straight, flat, boring and at times quite narrow. We stayed overnight at the Teresa Creek Dam just outside Clermont and continued on to the “Emerald City” the following morning. Along the way we encountered a large number of cattle on the road and at one point we hit an unmarked ditch in the road about 1 metre wide and 100mm deep at 100 kph which almost sent car and caravan airborne. A number of things were shaken about in the caravan but only one bowl broken thankfully. We are staying in the grounds of the Emerald Scout Hall
Emerald is quite a nice town in the middle of the gem mining area. Today we tried out some fossicking at a place called Sapphire and came away with some small pieces of sapphire. We also visited an underground mine at Rubyvale.  Photo below.

 

The people around here have a sense of humour as shown on a boat in a paddock

 

and on a mechanics workshop.

 

We leave here tomorrow heading for Roma but we will stop somewhere along the way.