7/9/13
Georgetown to Undara The road is soon to be a dual carriage way, so it's worth all the roadworks and the 1 lane sealed road for most of the journey.

We stopped in Mt Surprise, hoping to stay the night and take a tour out to the Topaz mine, run by the Gem shop, unfortunately it's a little late in the season, so after a quick fossick at the gem shop, in an $8 bucket, we learnt what to look for and, tony found a 10 carat stone, good enough for cutting - after a BLT for lunch the owner gave us a very informative demo of cutting faceting gems, including how they use a clever bit of software to decide on the facets etc .

As it was just after lunch, we decided to push on to Undara.

Undara is an outback resort, which luckily has a camp site included in its accommodation options of railway carriages, cabins, permanent tents, powered and unpowered camping sites.

After settling in we booked our Lava Tube Tour for tomorrow. The Undara Lodge has a beautiful, naturally landscaped swimming pool, surrounded by wallabies and roos so we took advantage of it and had a most welcome swim later in the afternoon.

An early dinner of wonderful snags which we had bought at the Georgetown butcher meant we could head to the camp fire, to listen to Chris talking about "Wings and Things". An interesting presentation on the local wildlife, I think we might be able to tell a Wallaby from a Roo now.