(27-05-13)
I am surprised afresh today at how fast good friendships can be established. It is especially easy when you discover friendly, like-mined people. And I love it!
Today we went out to the gem fields with Laszlo, Emeshe and Nikiah to try our luck at fossicking. First we went out to Jim’s little sapphire gems/fossicking place. There, for $10 you buy a tin pail of dirt and start searching.
First, the sand is poured into a sieve and sieved until the sand is fallen away and you are left with the medium to large rocks. Once you’ve combed through that you go and spin it around in a big 44 full of water. This washes the rest of the sand and dust and dirt off so that you can see the gems more clearly. Then you search again. The ideal and almost necessary ingredient in this process is light - sunlight in our case. In the sunlight, the gems have a broken glass-like gleam that distinguishes them from other stones that can be look-a-likes, like coal-stone.
Then, or I should say when we had combed through three of four buckets, we took our findings in to Jim and he told us in a jiffy which ones were pure enough to cut. We got a few.
FACT: the sapphire it’s self is clear. It’s the impurities that give it color.
Some of us also got to feed his brolgas while we were there. That was pretty cool. They are really pretty birds and I’d never seen them up close before. Well I have now!
From Jim’s place we went out to an old mineshaft that has been made into a museum and has tours down the shaft. We couldn’t go down on account of the price but we sat outside next to a big truck that had the kids enthralled until one of the staff roused on them. And we ate lunch. What a good lunch that was too! Well I guess everything is good when you’re starving!
From Jim’s place we went out to an old mineshaft that has been made into a museum and has tours down the shaft. We couldn’t go down on account of the price but we sat outside next to a big truck that had the kids enthralled until one of the staff roused on them. And we ate lunch. What a good lunch that was too! Well I guess everything is good when you’re starving!
Being out there was like stepping back a couple of hundred years. Tiny little shacks and caravans on miniature plots of scrubby bush. Marking the borders of these little properties are short, white stakes with the number of their ‘claim’ on them. It was seriously like the old selector days. But why do people choose to live out there?
Because it’s addictive. People are looking for happiness. So they are looking for their happiness in the wrong place. They spend their life digging around in the dust and sand and rocks looking for that one stone to make them rich and happy! But then again, it’s my oppinion that more then one of them have hit the jackpot but you wouldn’t know. They store up their treasures here on earth and keep looking because they discover that one gem doesn’t make them happy because they are looking in the wrong place. And they just keep searching.
After lunch we headed further out the bush to a public fossicking area where we met up with Jake, his wife Carmen and Chelsea, his little daughter. Jake took us into the scrub and down a little gully. Not that we found much. I spent most of the time chatting with Jake and Carmen. Once again, being able to make friends in such a short time is such a blessing.
We left as the sun began to set.
“And the evening and the morning were the 14th day…”
No comments:
Post a Comment