With the School Holidays upon us we face a shortage of accommodation at Carnarvon Gorge and head to Emerald for a few days. An easy drive that saw us in Rolleston where the local coffee van was serving Merlo Coffee and cakes. A bit of a bonus for this part of the world!

We arrive in Emerald and setup camp in the local show grounds where the sites are powered and the area maintained by the local Lions Club. The place is clean and welcoming and well worth the 3 nights for the price of 2 special deal.

We ask the Caretaker for a contact in Emerald to look at our fridge which is still refusing to run on LPG. He gives us the name of a local plumber who comes to us, sweats over the issue and leaves with everything running the way it should be. Seems that when the fridge was installed the igniter spark was not aligned with the gas nozzle properly so would only start if there was not breeze or a build up of gas. Then the regulator for the gas bottles was set too low so there was not really enough gas flow for the fridge to keep running. Hopefully that is now the end of the issue and we can get back to free camping although, with the area starting to heat up, we will probably be looking for powered sites so that the air conditioner can be used if it gets to hot to sleep.

After the fridge repairs we head out to Fairbairn Dam which is the water supply for the area. It’s a substantial body of water but is apparently only at 37% capacity so to see it full would be impressive. I took four pictures and stitched them together as the panoramic show below.

Fairbairn Dam – Panorama

Then its off to the Gemfields to see if we can find Stacey a Sapphire. Hmmm we are told while taking a guided tour of a mine that there are no rubies in Rubyvale and no emeralds in Emerald but there are sapphires in Sapphire. Some misleading town names in this area but the history around their naming is folklore. It seems that a gem found in Rubyvale was believed to be a ruby so the name stuck with the town but the gem, when examined by jewelers in Europe found it to be a red zirconia and Emerald was named by an Irishman who bought a parcel of land in the area as it reminded him of his home, the Emerald Isles. At the moment its so dry in the area it’s hard to imagine the place being lush and green.

There are a few pictures below showing the Gemfields loop that we drove taking in Sapphire, Rubyvale, Capella and back to Emerald.