Every day the air heats further up and the
weather forecast expects 45ºC today, but it
feels hotter, A few times a day we take a
dip in the swimming pool to cool off.
his night we sleep with a ventilator, which
moves the air and this is a big improvement.
This day, Valentine Day, we are on opal
shopping tour. We meet a young miner who
still does not have the funding to mine with
sophisticated equipment and does it by hand
(the mining). His opals however are very
nice and we buy 12 opals. It's difficult to
stop buying and Birgitt is eager to collect
more. In the town we meet Hans, who just
established his business and we buy another
9 Boulder opals. In the night we see again
the collection of George and Denise and they
have really showpieces. Expensive, but
quality just has its price in life! We buy
another 12 opals. Later we buy a few
opalised fossils. No we have enough to start
a shop in opals. But every gem is different
and has its own character. So it's tempting
to keep them all. In the
meantime we bought opals for more than we
spend to a trip to Australia. To prevent
we continue this buying frenzy, we leave in
the morning (however, the plan is to go for
other gem fields). It was predicted that
it would be hotter in the north, and they
were right. Measured in the shadow, the
thermometer reached quickly its maximum
indication of 53 ºC, so it must be hotter,
it indeed felt like in a sauna. If you
picked up a stone or metal from the shadow,
it burned in your hand so you could not
hold it. The only place to survive that heat
was driving in the car, with the
air-conditioning at full capacity. We
drove carefully, a car is not built or these
temperatures, some electronic functions did
fail, like the remote controlled central
locking. No Australians were visible;
probably they were surviving before the
air-conditioning. Just slowly walking was
almost impossible. Remarkably, the area was
still green as plenty rain has fallen a
month ago. We see kangaroos and the giant
emu birds. They will not have it easy to
survive. If you look under the trees
you see the emu's. It were the first and
last we saw this tour.
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