This time Zach was old enough to come on the Superpit mine tour but Liam wasn't so we had to skip this which I didn’t mind. We went to Hannan’s Tourist Mine instead and spent much longer than we thought we would. And we still didn’t read all the information boards. We thought it was really good value for money and had a good time despite some average reviews from other people. We had lunch in the Chinese gardens first and then went through all the old buildings, looking at all the displays. We climbed the hauler truck and the boys had a play in the cabin.









We spent a short time gold panning but Zach was tired and starting to get upset he wasn’t finding any gold.



In the afternoon we went to look at the Superpit from the pubic viewing area. It is 600m deep and quite amazing to see. The only disappointment was that there was no basting that day which I was keen to see. I rang up a while ago to find out how often they blast and the response I got was "pretty much every day". This was different to the signs at the viewing area saying 3-4 times a week. So I was annoyed as I would have gone to see it the day we arrived if I had known it wasn't as often as I was told.


We can’t fathom how little gold they pull out of this big operation vs the costs to extract it. On average they get a golf ball size worth of gold in 1 out of 7 truck loads hauled. Comparing this just to the cost of just running the haul trucks let alone all the other drilling, explosive, personnel costs, it's amazing the profits they still achieve. Each truck gets new tyres 24 times over its life span with each tyre costing $40 000 each! They also have one complete engine rebuild at a cost of $500 000 mid life span.