Holidaying at home usually means making return visits to coastal or wine-region favourites.
There’s plenty more to see. Anything Gascoyne, Pilbara, or Kimberley is a stretch away, by either a small or substantial degree.
The Goldfields is a surprisingly accessible idea, especially if you decide to go by train. Linda, Arnett and I decided precisely that. The Prospector leaves East Perth rail terminal at 7am and rolls into Kalgoorlie at 2pm.
After a little panic caused by the non-arrival of a pre-booked taxi, we became comfortably seated in Carriage 1 and rolled slowly out of East Perth at 7.15. And it stays slow, too. It shares the line with our suburban Transperth trains, so has to maintain a precise average finger-clickin’ style of pace until it clears suburbia.
Once it does, the diesel engine tucked away in its belly rumbles with rorty intent.
It’s a superb way to get to Kalgoorlie. The travel time is 7 hours. It makes a handful of stops by arrangement. Driving yourself would take a similar time, but the big bonus of the train is that you don’t have to dice with death on the Great Eastern Highway. Just sit back, watch a movie, tune in to the onboard Wi-Fi, read a book and top yourself up with good, cheap coffees and sandwiches.
Check the speed once in a while, too. As permitted, Prospector lines up the straights, gives you a little wink, breathes deeply, and playfully nudges the 161 km/h mark before another bend looms to ruin the feels.
Linda, Arnett and I chose a private townhouse in Kalgoorlie’s northernmost Piccadilly. Almost centrally located, it was an ideal home away from home. A reddish tinge to the pale grey carpet’s tread areas betrayed its belonging in a mining town.
Any ideas we harboured of dining in Kalgoorlie’s iconic Hannan Street hotels for our 3 night stay were quashed by the realities of travel fatigue and a desire for convenience. As luck would have it, the Tower Hotel was located directly opposite our townhouse. Each night, we sat at the same table. For a range of $21 to $26, the Tower delivers hearty meals to satisfy weary travellers and hungry miners and contractors alike. It was homely. Familar. Friendly.
The Kalgoorlie Super Pit tour is the main must-do in town. The scale of this thing is almost unfathomable. You can stand at its edge and still not get a sense it’s as long as the town and a fifth as deep. On a smaller scale, the Museum of the Goldfields is worth a visit, too. Allow the time.
All the hire car companies will allow their vehicles to go as far afield as Lake Ballard. It’s only necessary for the hirer to calculate the extra kilometres charge, and balance that against how far you’d kick yourself if you didn’t go. The road to Menzies is excellent, and the 6.30am minesite workers kept us quite frequent company. Menzies itself is pretty. It’s a shadow of what once was, but it’s well preserved, and the ladies in the diner are friendly.
Out here, you really do get the feeling you’re a frontier person, although it was braver and hardier souls who paved the way many decades prior. Still, few people ever get out this far, and it’s a thrill to do it. From Menzies, you turn left and take the Menzies-Sandstone road to the western shores of Lake Ballard. This is an excellent and even wider road, unusual with its light grey colour set against the reddish brown roadsides. We encountered no other vehicles.
At Lake Ballard, it was only us. And The Salt People.
