Indian-Pacific Train and the Big Pit February 22-23

Sunday, February 22-Monday, February 23

After Sunday breakfast we went to the waterfront where there is a large, but hard to see (because of amazing construction) bell tower:

This tower was built as Western Australia’s commemoration of the 200^th anniversary, in 1988,  of the settling of the country by the English.  Twelve of the eighteen bells came from St. Martin-in-the-Fields, the parish church of Buckingham Palace.  The story is that these very old bells, dating from the early 18^th century, were damaging the bell tower at St. Martin’s , and the bell tower needed to be reconstructed.  When that was done these old bells were put into storage and newer, lighter bells were installed.  The bells subsequently were  brought to Perth for this newly constructed bell tower.

We learned a great deal about bell chiming vs. bell ringing vs. bell pealing (all of which are quite different) and we learned about how the bells are installed.  For true bell ringing the bells are pulled to their upside down position:

Ropes are then pulled which flip the bell all the way around; multiple bells are done in sequence and multiple bell ringers are used.  For bell chiming, the bells are stored with the clapper down, and the rope is pulled with a little jerk on it to get the clapper to hit the bell.  Bells are tolled this way:

 A carillon is different yet, with the person ringing the bells using a keyboard which moves the clapper which hits the bell as the bell is stationary.  There is a small carillon on the tower:

Finally we left the bell tower and went to the train station where we boarded the Indian-Pacific, a train which goes from the Indian Ocean at Perth to the Pacific Ocean at Sydney.  We took it two nights and got off at Adelaide, in the center south of Australia.  Our cabin had an upper and a lower bunk, the train had an excellent restaurant, and a lovely lounge car where we met people from all over the world.  Conversation was aided by the free alcoholic beverages which flowed freely.

At 11:00 PM on our first night the train stopped at the largest open pit mine in the world, in the middle of nowhere in the desert.  It’s a gold mine which is truly enormous, called the Super Pit.  It was hard to get a picture, but here’s the best I could do:

The trucks moving around looked like Tonka toys down below.  There was a sort of museum, open at that hour, where the most impressive thing was the machines which work the mine.  Each dump truck holds 250 metric tons of dirt, and out of each ton they get about 2.2 grams of gold.  Yet it’s worth doing!  Here is a front end loader and the dump truck (note there is a person in the photo of the truck):

Joyce didn’t go to the pit, and I returned at about 1 AM Perth time.  Now a word about time.  Australia has a mish-mosh of time.  Some states have daylight savings, some don’t.  Southern Australia has time which is ½ hour off of any other time.  It’s so confusing that the train announces that while we are on the train we will forget the outside world and use “train time”.  I felt a bit like I was in an Albert Einstein thought experiment.  So we changed time ahead one hour after coming back from the pit, and then the second night we changed ahead 1 ½ hours, making us right with the Adelaide time, but wrong with the outside world much of the time we traveled.

We went across an endless desert:

 This is on the longest piece of straight track in the world, variously told to us a between 400 and 600 km.  It was indeed endless!  Finally, on the morning of the third day, we got up at 5:30 AM train time, which was by then also 5:30 AM Adelaide time to have breakfast at 6:15 AM and exit the train at 7:00 AM to begin touring Adelaide!