"Soon I will be here no more
You'll hear my tale
Through my blood"
This day has special significance. After this day I will only be going to places I have already visited. Kalgoorlie was last "new" destination on this trip. So 1 month left, thanks to insanely strong euro I am well below my budget and now going to familiar sights...it's holiday time :-)
Last sunday I left Adelaide and South Australia. I have little regrets that I gave SA - 3rd biggest state - only 6 days, but it was matter of choice between SA or WA and even though WA is already familiar to me, I still wanted to spend most of the time I have left in WA. Train journey from Adelaide to Kalgoorlie was just as horrible as I was fearing. Benches were incredibly uncomfortable so I couldn't really sleep at all and my arse hurt like hell the next day.
Most of the 26 hours train traveled we crossed area called Nullarbor Plains, which is basically one big limestone where no trees grow. Nullarbor is huge area, twice the size of England and 4 times size of Belgium! During trip we stopped at small service station called Cook.
Cook was peculiar place. Back when Indian Pacific was built 1917 they established town of Cook in middle of Nullarbor next to train line. They planted hundreds of trees and hoped to make an actual city there. They had established a water source by bumping it from underground river 90m below surface. Well, in the end Nullarbor defeated them and now Cook is ghost town with permanent population of 4 people.
Monday evening I finally arrived to Kalgoorlie, headed straight to my hostel and slept for about 12h :-)
Kalgoorlie is mining town, with true frontier and wild west atmosphere. Men working in massive mining pits, going to bar after work to drink beer and in the bar your normal bar staff is replaced by "skimpys", which are seriously hot girls dressed only in underwear. Yes, only in their underwear. To add to this, Kalgoorlie has unusually many working brothels which offer - get this - brothel tours for tourists!
Hehe, because of my backpacker budget I skipped brothels(I did!!) and spent all the evenings at Wild West Saloon drinking local beers and drooling over the skimpys with all the other men. Atmosphere there was so relaxed, skimpys were tons of fun and had absolutely no problem working there and having all the men staring at them. Also there were no security problems there. For some reason Kalgoorlie doesn't attract any tourists, so on both nights I was only tourist in the bar drinking with local miners. Btw. I also learned that it impresses tough guys like miners lot more to tell them that I work in forestry industry cutting down trees, than tell them I work in an office programming software... ;-)
Today I'm heading down to coast again and to Esperance where I last visited December 2006. I can only hope they have forgotten my karaoke performance there...
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