Banka Banka Station

Yesterday we woke up at 6:00 and got ready very quickly. We were in the car with the caravan down by 6:30. We were leaving Alice Springs. We stopped an hour later at Gemtree. Gemtree is a caravan park and a place where you can do fossicking tours. We weren't staying there though, we were going to fossick for some gems. We drove to the place where the fossicking tour was and were taught how to find garnets. Here is what a garnet looks like.

Ours looked nowhere near that good!

We used a pickaxe to loosen the dirt and rocks, a shovel to put it into a bucket and then we poured it into a dry sieve and took out the big rocks. Then we poured the rocks into a wet sieve. Then we cleaned the rocks and checked for garnets.

We found a lot of garnets and took them back so the man could have a look at them. He said they were garnets but they were fractured.That meant  that they had a crack in the middle but it didn't affect the outside. Even though they weren't valuable, we bought some little jars to put them in.

We got back in the car and kept driving. At about four o'clock we arrived at Banka Banka Station. There was a public phone box (they are free now!) and I had never talked to someone on a public phone.  My dad said I could call my grandparents so I talked to them for a while.

Then we went and fed the friendly farm donkeys and brahma cows at the edge of the caravan park. The cow had a very long tongue! 

After we fed the animals, we walked to a waterhole. The 2km walk was definitely worth it. There were lots of little fish in the water and a big hill that my dad and I climbed up. 

We came back to the caravan park and walked up the hill to take a photo of the sunset. Then we had dinner and sat around the big fireplace at our caravan park. By then, it was bedtime.