Mum, Kate and dad fossicking

We had been told that the Anakie Gemfields were a great place to go sapphire fossicking. From my map, the Anakie Gemfields were accessible either on an 80km unsealed (no tarmac) road from Clermont or alternatively about double that distance on a mixture of sealed and unsealed roads. We thought it would be fun and a true Aussie experience to go for the 80km of unsealed roads. It was fun, for probably the first 20km, but then as we saw no signs of life (or indeed any signs at all to tell us where we were heading) and the dirt roads got rougher and dustier we started to feel increasingly panicky as we kept driving and driving and there was nothing about at all but the odd cow. By my reckoning we should have been at the Gemfields, but we were so remote, we could hardly imagine anyone actually manning a tourist attraction here! At last we got to a junction with a sign, that said we were almost at a place called Rubyvale, a long way past the Anakie Gemfields!! Now, we were very confident in the fact that we had not gone past the gemfields without knowing because we would have noticed anything in the remoteness where we just come from! We were feeling very dejected as we decided to head for Rubyvale anyway and see what was there. As we neared the town we saw some signs for fossicking, hurrah! As we drove into Rubyvale it felt as though we were the only visitors that had been this way for decades, the few people in the street were staring as we parked up and got out of the car to see where we were. We decided to ask at the village store, but as we got there we realized it had shut down a year or so ago and the public toilets nearby were completely overgrown. It was like a ghost town! We found a store that was open and asked about the illusive Anakie Gemfields – they told us the Anakie Gemfields is the name for the whole area, it isn’t actually a place!! So, on my map I had been heading for the random place where the mapmakers had decided to write the name for that area – almost like heading for a place called ‘North Yorkshire’ in England!! There is actually a place called Anakie, but that is quite a way away from where we were heading.
We asked about fossicking and they told us the best place to visit was, a place called Miners Heritage. Here, you can visist Australia’s largest underground sapphire mine as well as try your luck with fossicking.