Rubyvale

It ended up taking us an hour to leave Theresa Creek Dam once we had packed up – just saying good bye to the great friends we had made there. But from there we headed down to the town of Rubyvale which is one of the towns in that area known for sapphires. We did an underground tour of a sapphire mine then bought a bucket of dirt to have a go at fossicking. Well Jaime and Shell didn’t think we would find anything, but they were mistaken, Aidan and Cody ended up finding about 20 pieces of sapphire. We went and got them assessed by a gem expert and they said, that most people find sapphire which is either too cloudy or simply too small to cut into a gemstone which was the case with most of the boy’s findings. But as she was going through their find she pulled one piece out and said that it was a very nice gem indeed and we would be able to get it cut into a gemstone at least 5mm in diameter. So Shell is going to buy the stone from the boys and get it cut and put into a ring as a memento of our trip.

Aidan and Cody down the sapphire mine with a pretend miner

In one of the tunnels of the mine

Loading up the seive and getting out the big rocks and soil

Shaking the seives in water

Cody checking for sapphires

From Rubyvale we headed towards Longreach camping the night at a place called Bogantungan. Not much there, a railway station and 2 houses.