16 Dec 2015 - Tasmania Day 3: Adventure to an abandoned Silver Mine

We were back at Silver Ridge from Tasmazia at about 4:30pm.  As it was still early for dinner, we decided to embark on an adventure into an abandoned silver mine.  The owner of Silver Ridge (John) gave us some direction to the mine which is about 1 km from our cottage.  He told us that the mine was in operation till about 1870s.  He also lent us each a torchlight as we'll be in total darkness inside the mine.  As the mine was quite muddy, we borrowed gumboots from him as well.  He told us that we can set off first while he'll prepare the gumboots and placed them at the mine entrance.

The silver mine is located inside the rainforest.  We followed the sign and off we go on our adventure.

It's quite a long walk up a gentle slope before we reached the rainforest.

From here, we began our search for the silver mine.

There is a huge tree stump in the rainforest which was quite interesting.

After searching for about half an hour, we still could not find the mine entrance.  We did not feel quite right because according John, we should be able to reach the mine in 10 mins once we entered the rainforest.  By then, we were all very tired.  We decided to give ourselves another 15 mins to search for the mine.  Just when we were about to give up, we heard the sound of a quad-bike.  I quickly went towards the direction where the sound came from and as expected, John was here looking for us.

He said we had missed the mine and pointed out the correct direction to us.  Based on his direction, we actually had to bash through a path which I initially thought was inaccessible.

Finally we saw the entrance to the mine and were very excited.

The gumboots were there and we started putting them on.

And here we went.........

It was quite muddy once we entered the mine.  Even with gumboots, we had some difficulties moving forward.  However we stayed calm and moved one step at a time.  

We had to walk right in the middle of the mine and avoid touching the wall on both sides as that's where cave spiders are.

Here's a short video of our adventure.

At one point in the mine, we all turned off our torchlight and guess what, there were glow-worms all around.  We did not stay in the mine for too long as Jerlene and Javier were quite anxious to get out.  I could sense that they were pretty stress while in the mine.  Though they had been playing minecraft, this actual mine is not what they had expected.

We finally can relax a bit after getting out of the mine.  As we slowly walked back to the entrance of the rainforest, we saw the below sign!  How could all of us missed it when we were here earlier......sigh...... Look how tired the kids were but what an experience!  

The way back to our cottage was much easier as it was down slope.  Along the way, we had some fun shouting and listening to the echo from the mountains around us,

I could not resist not taking a photo of Mount Roland every time I passed by this pond.

What an adventure we had earlier.  It's not something that most people will do.  Furthermore, we were all on our own.  Such adventure is definitely not for the faint-hearted.  I suspect Javier could be the youngest adventurer into the mine.  :-)

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