Today a bit of a rest day with a late start and some whip cracking by mummy to get some schoolwork done. We headed to the info Centre in Kununurra where kids saw some buddies from Alice. We thought the pink diamond Centre in town might have a bit of a spiel about the mine but was just a shop, was fun to look at the pink diamonds anyways. I knew they were expensive but didn’t realise just how much they are or how rare either. The lady once she realised there was no $300,000 sale happening (not that that wasn’t plainly apparent upon our entry to the shop) showed us a champagne glass full of fakies equivalent to how many diamonds were mined in a year at their Argyle mine. She also gave kids a fakie each so all was not lost. We headed out to the Sandalwood factory where it was interesting to learn about the ‘host trees’ each sandalwood needs to thrive. The sandalwood has a beautiful rich, almost sickly sweet smell and the air around the plantations reminiscent of old wine oak barrels which I will always now associate with Kununurra. We loved driving through the farming systems of sandalwood, fruit trees and intensive agriculture that the Argyle Dam supplies, on our way to the zebra rock place. We were mainly visiting here to humour Tommy, so the talking cocky out the front was enough entertainment for the first 5 mins. We headed in, dragging kids away for the usual frantic ‘no touching’ and ‘can I buy this’ conversations around the display. The lady caretaking was a grey nomad from Cowra (who had stopped in Kununurra a few years back) She directed us outside to the workshop to meet the craftsman who was very generous with his time once he saw we were interested. It must be an effort to go through the same spiel over and over each time someone turns up. I would never have the tolerance to be in tourism. We all got to shave off a bit of the soft zebra rock with a file and he explained how it was the only seam of it in the world, 15m wide running under the Argyle dam -they had a lease to mine a bit on each side. They think it was formed from an magnetic anomaly during a seismic event that aligned the iron particles into straight lines. Everyone was allowed to have a tiny piece for their collection and we headed off for some pies for lunch. We had a quiet afternoon, early night at the campground, everyone a bit tired.