Sovereign Hill

August 24, 09

Had the room to myself last night.. strangely, it took me a while to get to sleep because there was no one to worry about and I was worried about that.. lol go figure.

got up just before 6am this morning, got to make all the noise I wanted, which was great. Then met up with Bruno after breakfast. He's the guy I took pictures for on the Great Ocean Road tour because his batteries were dead. He tried to add me to Facebook, but we couldn't find me.. so I'll have to remember to add him to mine.. Bruno Costa, easy name to remember. :) (now that I've written it down in any case!)

Got on the bus to do the Sovereign Hill tour and it was the same driver that picked me up yesterday! he had no problems finding me today... yesterday he missed me completely! lol.

Again, I was the first picked up, at 7am, then my bus didn't leave till 8:30am...I had time to kill. So I walked around Federation Square and took pictures. It started to rain.. not too promising for the day... bus got there.. I got the front seat.. again! but it was pouring rain... so not much to see. Though on the way there was a lovely rainbow. I really liked the town of Ballarat. It was pretty and not too big and had lots of lovely buildings. Sovereign Hill was absolutely worth my day out. The day was overcast, threatening, very windy and quite cold. there were fire pits set up all over town to give us a chance to warm our fingers a bit. The little town was almost empty of tourists. there was a school group after a bit, but really, the volunteer play-actors outnumbered us tourists.. it was great! I was one of the first to walk up the main street from our group and a gentleman in a bowler hat (I think.. don't know my hat styles very well) invited me to a game of darn... the name of the game escapes me at the moment. I figured, eh, why not? so I followed him and the game turned out to be a type of pool game. there were 9 cups/holes at the end of the table, one black ball, two red balls and 6 white balls. We each got a red ball and flipped a coin to see who went first. The object of the game was to get the black ball into one of the cups. The middle cup (as they were set in a circle of 8 and the 9th cup was in the middle of the circle) was worth 9 points, and the others were respectively worth 1 through 8 points each. The black ball I was told doubled your score, as did getting the red ones in. The white ones were only worth face value of the hole/cup you got it into. I got whooped in all 3 games I played, but it was a fun game that could easily become addictive!

I continued on my way down to the mine tour. I had to pay an extra $6, but it was well worth it. it was a guided tour, and there were only three of us on the tour. we went down on a type of tram, similar to the one I went down in Sydney in the Blue Mountains called the Red Devil. This time, though, it was done in the dark to get us down the mine shaft. very cool. The guide explained the mine to us and going for gold and what the conditions were like. Great tour, then we took a bit of a roller coaster ride on a rail cart back to the beginning, lots of fun..

From there I went and checked out the old bowling alley, what a hoot... the gutters are larger than the alley, though there's a bit of a curve in the alley so it's easy to keep the ball on track. The alley is about double the length of our modern alleys and you can only bowl through your legs, two handed and not one handed.

From there I saw the shop where they made coffins, then candles, then headed to the gold pouring show. the man showed us how to melt gold, told us the temperature it melts at and so on. He poured it and told us that the little bar he poured was worth about $800 000 I think, something like that. He let a little school girl hold it so that her school friends could take photos of her with the gold before he put it away in the safe.

I had lunch then went to the post office, sent mom and dad a post card from Sovereign Hill just as the firing squad was walking behind me on the road, drums rolling. I then went on the self-walking tour of a mine, that wasn't as good as the guided tour, but still fun and interesting. They have holograms telling stories, so that's pretty neat.

After the mine tour I went to the chinese part of Sovereign Hill, they were forced to be camped in tents in their own area, segregated from the rest of the settlement. There was quite the discrimination at the time toward the chinese, large fees to be permitted to mine, even being beaten to death by other miners when the other miners were down on their luck. It's quite the history.

I went to the Gold museum after that and got to see some Canadian coins, that was fun.