The Billion Dollar Man

I always knew that Darrell was valuable, but I never knew that he was worth $7,130,200.00, more or less.  That is the value of his weight in gold at the price of gold when he visited the Perth Mint.  This is one of the branches of the British Mint in Australia.  He toured and saw how gold was turned into coins, including one very large one (solid gold).







The Mint produces silver coins as well, and also does some other casting, such as this ANZAC memorial bell, one of a set of bells.  Interestingly enough, many of the bells are mounted upside down.

It all starts with finding gold.

The buildings in Perth are spectacular, especially the Bell Tower.  You can walk up over 100 steps to get to the observation level, or you can take the elevator.  Guess which one Darrell did?

Darrell saw buildings;  I saw rocks.  Western Australia is miles and miles of miles and miles.  Very little of the land is settled or even explored.  The aborigines have lived on the land for thousands of years, moving from area to area following the seasons and the game.  In the 1960's someone stumbled on some really unusual rock formations which have been named The Pinnacles.  There was really never reason for anyone to travel in this area.  The land is rocky sand with little moisture and only stunted bushes growing.  Scientist do not agree on how The Pinnacles were formed, but one thing they all agree on is that bits of seashells blowing in the strong wind combined with elements in the soil to form a substance that solidified into solids.  Some think the material got into the soil, was absorbed by trees growing there.  When sand covered the area from sandstorms, the trees died, but the solid minerals in the trees remained.  When later sandstorms blew away the sand, the stronger material remained.  However they were formed, there are a lot of them.

Bushes have thick, prickly leaves for protection.

This gives you some idea of the vastness of the area.

Those are not snow-capped mountains in the background.  The Indian Ocean is in the distance, and the blowing sand has formed dunes which move inland and cover the vegetation with very fine white sand.

Along the way we saw strange looking "trees" called grass trees or "black boys" because the early settlers thought that, from a distance, they looked like warriors with raised spears.

One of the largest industries in the area is the catching and processing of "crawfish" which we know as lobsters.  Our tour included a tour of the processing facility where the lobsters are inspected, sorted by size and packaged to be shipped, live, all over the world.  Unfortunately, there had been a power failure, so all the lobster were transferred to a different facility, but we saw where the work would have been done.  Then they fed us lunch.




















We stopped to see the beach.  You can see how the sand is trying to cover the near-by vegetation.

Bights and Birthdays

Our greeting party

We crossed the Great Australian Bight to get to Albany.  If you look at a map of Australia, you can see an area to the southwest which looks as if a large bite was taken out of the continent.  That is not how it got its name.  In geographic terms, a bight is a large shallow and wide bay.  Different sources say it faces the Indian Ocean but others call the water the South Sea.  Whatever you call it, it can be a bit rough.  We made it to Albany unharmed.













My tour took me to the Old Gaol (Jail) and a wind farm that powers the city of Albany.  If you have seen one wind farm, you have seen them all.  Much the same could be said about old jails in Australia.  They were usually built by convicts sent from England, even though not too many of the convicts were ever held there.  Instead, the nonviolent offenders were sent out to help settlers subdue the Australian landscape and to build homes.  This jail housed local offenders and those convicts from England who got into trouble in Australia.

Some of the indigenous people were held there, but in a separate room where one of them carved aboriginal symbols into the walls.  This was not a prison where you could easily escape over the walls.










The courtyard outside the jail and museum had this huge fig tree.






Whales were once abundant in the oceans south of Australia but were almost driven to extinction by the whaling industry before whaling was banned by international treaty.  Albany had the last great fleet of whale boats. For this reason they have a museum entirely devoted to whales and whaling.
Darrell went there.  There were no live whales, just skeletons and an explanation of how whales were slaughtered.

The last whaling ship

The main Street

The main street of Albany is a mix of the old, the new and the memories.  Little shops and restaurants line the main street interspersed with two large churches and the Town Hall.

Baptist church

Town Hall

Memorial to soldiers on the Great War

It was at Albany that many thousands of soldiers from Australia and New Zealand departed to fight in World War I.  Thousands of them were killed in Turkey.  These troops were part of the ANZAC or Australia New Zealand Army Corp.  Albany has a large museum and memorial dedicated to them and also a small sculpture on the main street.

There are also animals to be seen.  Kangaroos are separated from horses by fences which stop the horses, but not the kangaroos.  Australia has a program to beautify the waterfronts by painting murals on the grain terminals.  This is the local dragon.

In the evening we attended the 90th birthday party of the man who invented the lithium battery.

A Quick Trip to Adelaide

In case you cannot see the price of this
chocolate egg, it is $47.50!

I do not have much to write about Adelaide because we did not spend much time there, less than 10  hours.  Our included tour took us by bus for an hour drive into downtown Adelaide where we were dropped off at a mall, or rather a shopping street.  Since we needed to get some more Australian money, we found an ATM.  The ATM only gives out $20 bills, and we needed to get smaller change to tip the guide and driver.  The ATM just happened to be right outside a candy store, so of course, we had to buy some candy to get change. 

Haigh's is supposed to be the best chocolate in Australia.

And then the next store had souvenir hats at a good price, so Darrell needed a new hat.  By then it was almost time for our bus to pick us up, so we did not venture any further down the street.  We met the bus at Bee Hive corner.

The driver tried to point out and identify several sights, but I could not get pictures from the bus, except this one which give you the idea that Adelaide is in the middle of a construction boom like most of Australia.







We next went to the historic seaside resort town of Glenelg. (Try getting your tongue around that palindrome.)  Even the trash cans tell you that it is by the sea.



                            On a lovely Saturday afternoon a lot of locals     
                     were out enjoying the warm sunshine.





















The Town Hall had a fine museum, but there was not enough time to really explore it.  The site where the official Proclamation of the British Colony of South Australia took place is in Glenelg.  There is a park called the Proclamation Grounds.  We did not see it, but there was a picture of it in the museum. 



















          On the main street, just by the beach was               a memorial to the people killed in wars.

Fjord or Sound?

This blog is out of order.  We visited Doubtful Sound and Milford Sound several days ago, but I just realized that I had not sent anything out about them.

First I have to clarify the names.  A sound is a large sea or ocean inlet, deeper than a bight and wider than a fjord; or a narrow sea or ocean channel between two bodies of land.  A fjord is a long, narrow inlet with steep sides or cliffs, created by a a glacier.   Evidently the explorers did not make that distinction because, by definition, Milford Sound and Doubtful Sound in New Zealand are fjords. We have seen several Norwegian fjords, but most have been "civilized" with roads and farms along the sides.  The fjords in New Zealand have no such trappings.  There is a dirt, very windy steep road which touches the end of Milford Sound, however, so tourists may take a boat from there to explore the area.

Doubtful Sound is farther south on the west coast of the Southern Island of New Zealand than Milford Sound.  When we were there it was overcast and rainy with low clouds.  I did not take any pictures.  By the time we got to Milford Sound, the sun had come out so I took lots of pictures, and so did Darrell.  It was difficult to decide which ones to include, but here goes.

Mitre Peak

This is the boat in the picture above right.

Can you see the kayaks at the bottom of the falls?

Glaciers top some mountains.

Falls at far end of Milford Sound

Steep side walls and narrow width

Really steep side walls