Week 51/52 - Golden Quest Disovery Trail - red dirt and gold fields - Niagra Dam

Hi everyone and welcome to Week 51 of our 52 week Tour Downunder Western Australia. We are nearly to the end of our journey, and this week we head north from Kalgoorlie and into more of the gold mining areas.

From Kalgoorlie you can do the goldfields Golden Quest Discovery Trail, a 965 loop which takes you through some of the history and landscapes of the goldfields.

Here we are on the road.....

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And here we are in Menzies. Below is a photo of the Council Offices. Completed in 1896 the clock tower remained "clockless" for one hundred years despite being built to overcome the locals confusion about the "real time". The clock was finally installed in 1999.

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This is Lake Ballard - a huge salt lake - part of a number of salt lakes that follow the course of ancient river beds. An interesting feature of Lake Ballard is 51 statues that are spread out over one part of the Lake, installed in 2003 by British artist Antony Gormley for the Perth International Arts Festival. The lake is a hazardous environment, and visitors are warned to walk with someone else and that temperatures on the lake reach over 45 degrees Celsius (113F) in summer.

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Here is one of "out bush" pubs - Ora Banda, built in 1911 from local stone. And part of all that remains of the goldmining town of Ora Banda which had a population of 2000 in 1910.

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We visited the old townsite of Gwalia - Goldmining began here in 1897, but today Gwalia is essentially a ghost town, having been largely deserted since the main source of employment, the Sons of Gwalia gold mine, shut down in 1963 and the town became deserted virtually overnight. Residents from nearby Leonora keep the deserted buildings as a museum of sorts - you can wander about the old buildings and get a feel of what life was like in the old days.

Here is the old mechanics garage - the walls are adorned with vehicle number plates.

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And the old hotel.......

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A pressed metal wall inside one of the houses....

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Tonight we will camp at Niagra Dam - built in 1897 to service the nearby gold mining town of Niagra, the gold soon ran out, the town died, and the dam never reached its full potential due to unreliable rainfall, and a major source of fresh underground water was found near the new townsite of Kookynie.

It is a lovely place to camp, and several walk trails take you around the dam and amongst the breakaway seen here in this photo....

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here is our camp at Niagra Dam. You can see our car is a little dirty from the red dust roads.

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