It's Road Trip 2022 edition. This one was about ten days long and encompassed Kalgoorlie, Esperance and Albany. All on the road, starting in Kalgoorlie at the start of February 2022.
I drove to Kalgoorlie and met L who'd flown in from the big smoke, where we stayed at the luxurious Hospitality Kalgoorlie Motel on the main street into Kalgoorlie. We'd managed to book ourselves a two bed upstairs apartment on the main road into Kalgoorlie.
As is mandatory in any new place, we had to checkout the Mount Charlotte lookout over at the north east end of Kalgoorlie, which honestly was very average, but offered some views of the nearby mines and Kalgoorlie in the distance.
We visited the Hannan North Tourist Mine, which if you're visiting Kalgoorlie, you're going to want to learn about mining. It's this or the Museum of Mining. I didn't go to the latter because there's only so much mining information any human can absorb.
The Tourist Mine was cute. Fairly large area with a bunch of information filled sheds, fake mines, a ridiculous amount of reading material printed on highly reflective metal plaques and a Chinese Garden of Remembrance. It's like a theme park but without the fun. Still good though considering it was $15 each and you could easily spend half a day walking around the place. Go first thing in the morning and you'll have the place to yourself.
You can even get married at the Chinese Garden for only $850. Bargain!
On the south side of Kalgoorlie is the historic Burt Street. Walking down each side, we saw a bunch of impressive colonial buildings, some random art deco building and at the bottom end was the old City Hall building. City Hall is free to get into, but the War Exhibition requires a guilt induced voluntary donation.
We booked ourselves into the Questa Casa Historical Brothel, which claims to be the only original brothel left in Kalgoorlie, operating as a proper brothel, but without any working girls there, so...I guess not.
At a premium $30 per person for a long chat and viewing a couple of the rooms, I didn't feel I got my money's worth, but there is always the novelty factor I guess. The post lunch slump may have made it more of a struggle for me.
On a friend's recommendation we visited Manning Park. A public park, opposite the cemetery, just like any other park on entry, but uniquely contains some caged birds, a pond and fountain, manicured gardens, café, free roaming peacocks, weird geese type birds and....wait for it, a miniature Bavarian castle.
Any visitor to Kalgoorlie will always tell you to visit the Kalgoorlie Super Pit. Before this trip I'd been to Kal half a dozen times but never visited the Pit, until now. It's free to visit, it's a massive hole in the ground, in return for a tiny amount of gold that people pay lots of money for. It's an engineering marvel, but also kind of sad.
