Us fossicking for sapphires

SIXTEENTH DAY – SATURDAY 24TH JULY
Up at 7 am Graeme cooked breaky on the bbq and we left at 8.10 am after filling up our vans water tanks as the water was pretty good/drinkable in Rocky. Filled the van with petrol and began travelling east along the Capricorn Hwy – so named because it follows the Tropic of Capricorn. There was a train track running along most of the way – electric train. We saw a few very long trains carrying coal. I counted over 100 trucks on the train and Graeme calculated that they were about one and half kilometres long. They looked those caterpillars that follow each other nose to tail. There were a lot of wattles out in flower which looks really spectacular. In Blackwater we saw the Leichardt dig tree and Blackwater is the coal capital of Queensland. From Comet (so named because Leichardt saw Haleys Comet here) the terrain became flat and scrubby with trees of silvery leaves. In Emerald we saw the very big painting of Van Gough’s Sunflower painting. This area is renowned for growing sunflowers (which were all seeding), cotton, sorghum, and wheat. We then made away to Rubyvale through Sapphire. This area is well known for the sapphires mined here. We went on a tour at the Miners Heritage Walk-in Mine which was very interesting. We learnt about where the sapphires are found in the ground. We also got a bucket of rocks to have a play with and learnt how to sieve and wash and look for sapphires. We found quite a few small ones in a bucket. This was a fun activity so we bought some rocks to take with us to have a play with. We then found a really nice place to camp in behind Sapphire called Big Bessie Fossicking area. If you wanted to you could get a two dollar fossicking licence and dig for sapphires, but we went there just to camp and after seeing were most other travellers were camping and squashed up on a block of land for the night, we had the best place. There were a few other people camping there also but there place was so big you could easily spread out and not disturb anyone. We think it was close to full moon if not actually full moon, it looked awesome peeking through the trees and the clouds surrounding it every now and then. Off course I tried to take photos and I fiddled with settings on my camera to find the best one to do the job. I think I got some good shots. Graeme cooked an awesome meal of prawns, morton bay bugs and oysters and vegies on the bbq. He spiced the prawns with garlic, chilli and worcestershire sauce and the oysters with worcestershire, bacon garlic and little bit of chilli. They were extremely tasty. Even though it is our wedding anniversary tomorrow we made this our special dinner as we had to cook the seafood. We had a very nice evening under the full moon and stars and candle lit dinner.