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Whether you are looking for a cheap opal or a true outback experience, the Yowah Opal Festival should be on your itinerary. Australia is known for many of its natural resources and opals are probably on the top of that list. The cheapest way to purchase it would be through a wholesale resource just like any other commodity.

Opal on display at the exhibit

What is this festival?

The Yowah Opal Festival is hands-down the most prestigious annual gathering in the opal trade. Businesses are looking for opal miners who can provide them quality opal at a good price for their business, opal miners are here to find buyers. Although the festival isn't held for the average Joe, it gives everyone who desires a precious gem a chance to get them at a bargain!

the marketplace

At Night:

The Festival starts out with a night of bonfire that is taller than all of us. The firewood required was so chunky, they had to use construction machinery to drive it over. Everyone gathers around the fire while we wait for the all-you-can-eat BBQ. We eat to our heart's content with live folk music playing in the background on the little stage. Most of the participants knows each other since it's not that big of an industry and all the miners, polishers and sellers have some business with one another at any point in time.

Not much lighting aside from these and the fire

A miner looking into the fire

Chris enjoying the warmth of the fire

really good BBQ buffet resembling American Southern food

embers flying high

In The Morning:

The booths are set up before the break of dawn, ready for buyers to have their treasure hunt. You can always try to bargain for better deals than priced. The more you buy from the same stall, the cheaper it can get. Often times they sell more than just opals. You can find all sorts of gems including pearls and fossils around the market. Walk around, talk to people, don't commit until you're really ready. Oh and definitely bring at least a couple hundred dollars of cash with you, most if not all stalls are cash only.

Tips on Finding Good Opal:

Many vendors will have buckets of opals sitting in water. Opals have a crystalline structure that absorbs water, making it easier for light to travel and thus reflect from. Make sure the opal stone shines even without water. While choosing your opals, dry the surface and set them aside. Decide at the end which piece of opal strikes your fancy.

The price of a piece of opal is fairly subjective. There is no actual scale for the pricing and it is fairly flexible in terms of market value. You look for the value of an opal through three characteristics: the patterns, the color of light reflected through the opal, and the way light reflects off of it. The rare colors in opals are blacks and reds. Patterns can range from matrixes (kind of holographic) to pinfires (dots/ rays of holographic patterns). Marine opals are mainly blue and green and will cover the whole surface of the gem. Boulder opals are stones or fossolized trees embedded with streaks of opals through them. The small moonstone like opals with firepin or matrix patterns through them can be very valuable due to the rarity of pure opals. Overall, how much you like a piece of opal should be the deciding factor on whether you will purchase it. There is no point in having some really expensive piece of rock with you if you don't love it.

There are also exhibits set up for rare opals and opals that has been incorporated in sculptures and other art forms.

Location:

The bargains are extremely attractive, but the festival is never crowded with tourists due to its geological disposition. The location of this annual festival is in the heart of the great outback of Australia. For those who are unfamiliar with the outback, I will try to put things into perspective. Yowah is a small town/ community. According to the 2006 census, Yowah had a population of 142. We visited the town in July 2015, according to the locals we spoke to the population has since then decreased to around 50 residents. This town is 132 km (82mi) from Brisbane, the nearest city. The annual festival is the single big event that gathers several hundred attendants to help support the town.

putting things into perspective, Yowah is over 13 hours away from the closest city.

Accomodation:

The town is too small with too little traffic over other times of the year for any accomodation. Your best bet is camping in a tent or sleep in your car. It's quite nice to be able to chit chat with our neighbors, we learned lots about opals quality and mining.

Our bed in serenity.

A few of our own purchases:

We have purchased quite a few boulder opals that we absolutely love ranging from $5-20 a piece depending on how rare the pattern and colors were. (the ones shown below were less than $10 each) Throughout our travels we seeked for similar opals to estimate pricing and most were 2-5 times more expensive than our purchases.

If you love the adventure and have the time and money around July, I would highly recoomend that you visit the Yowah Opal Festival. The opal miners are really hurting at the moment as demand is plummeting. By visiting, you can support local businesses and people's livlihood. The opals are cheaper than you can find anywhere else and definitely genuine as experts are all in the area to call out fawks gems. If you are interested, you might even be able to make a bit of profit by reselling the opals you obtain there elsewhere!

Would you go to the Yowah Opal Festival if you're in the country around July? Which one of the exhibit pieces did you like most?

Aboriginals believe spotting platypuses in the wild is a good omen and the encounter will bring you luck. Platypuses are quite surreal in their appearance. These cuties have duck bill, beaver tail, and webbed feet and are the only mammals that lay eggs to give birth. They are awesome, but very hard to find in nature. Platypuses are shy in nature and can dive underwater for 30-40 seconds at a time and will come up to the surface for 10-20 seconds to recover before diving again. If they notice that you are there making lots of noises, you're almost guaranteed they'll just hide under plants and stay out of view during their recovery time. So be sure to keep it hush hushed if you wish for an encounter.

Learn more about Platypuses here.

When:
Before diving into the locations to find these gorgeous creatures, we must understand their habits. You can search for hours for them during the day and might not even get the sight of a tail. Platypuses are nocturnal and hunts at night. To find them when there is daylight you must either seek for them at dawn or dusk. They will be hunting and going up and down the water in timed intervals. Find them floating about posing for pictures and selfies with you while they're trying to catch a breath.

Where:

1. Yungaburra Platypus Viewing Platform. (Queensland, Australia)

This is the star of the show, we were able to spot over half a dozen platypuses in the course of half an hour. The Platypus viewing platform is located in a town Yungaburra on the Tablelands about 2 hours drive from Cairns. Upon arrival, people tend to look down from this viewing platform praying for a sighting. Don't wait there, you won't see a thing. Instead, walk down towards the bridge and on the side of it will be a trail along the river. You will probably see many others seeking these magical little creatures. We were there in August and as long as you are quiet, the chances are you will see at least one of them.

Tip: look for bubbles, when there are big bubbles concentrated at a point it means a platypus is going out of breath and will surface soon.

Here's what trip advisor had to say about the location here.

2. Lake Elizabeth in the Otway forest. (Victoria, Australia)

If you won't be in Queensland during your visit you can also try Lake Elizabeth. Platypus or not, this is a location worth visiting. The lake is unique with timber in the middle of the lake reflecting beautifully off the water.

The easy way:

The platypus viewing is commercialized and you can easily book a canoe tour . You will have a tour guide meeting you at the car park and they will provide you with information as you walk towards the lake. Then from there two canoes will be taken out during dusk and everyone will be on the lookout for platypuses on the water. The tour is $85 per adult, so naturally as the broke backpacker we are, we opted out.

The hard way:

We came to Lake Elizabeth looking and searching for platypuses. At the end, we believe we glimpsed at one, but it was pretty hard to tell and we were feeding lots of mosquitoes. It's definitely a luck thing and that's why a sighting is valued by aboriginals. However, we did catch the canoe tour walking back after getting off the canoe and the tour guide pointed out at various interesting things in the night forest. We were able to see glow worms light up like the night sky under a canopy of vegetation. That alone was well worth walking through the dark trail.

We decided against the Top of Australia for a magical haven called Elim Beach. Our original plan was to travel from the furthest point South of Australia to the furthest point North. Though we were excited about the voyage, everyone we encountered discouraged us from going to Cape York. The general idea is that if you don't have a really good 4 wheel drive with plenty of extra fuel, you're going to suffer.

Ok, so we opted out. At this point we are already in Cook Town, pretty far up North of Queensland. We looked on our WikiCamp App and decided to check out a mystical sounding beach "Elim Beach". Elim beach is located on the shore of a large aboriginal (Natives of Australia) community called "Hope Vale Aboriginal Community". It is also owned by Eddie Deemal, a traditional aboriginal man. What better way to experience Australia a little bit untouched by colonization from the west?

This was one of the best decisions we have made on our trip.

Getting there was a little on the rough side, but we were still able to manage the drive with our Honda-CRV (an SUV).

The beach isn't a highly praised tourist destination, so most campers are local and the site is not crowded at all. That night, we camped on the beach watching the beautiful sunset. (Although the sunset came at a price of getting stuck in the soft sand. Good thing our friends helped us get it out with their Maxtrax and we got out just fine at the end.)

Warning: for tent campers, there is a known croc in the area and it is highly advised not to have your tent too close to the water. Just in case.

For our first day there we explored the far stretch of land exposed by low tide. A large amount of tide pools filled with a variety of marine life. Lots of large sized starfishes scattered in the pools trying to keep moist. We then walked through the many shacks the locals use for the weekends. On our way we found plenty of unclaimed coconut eddie said we can try knocking down.

Us knocking coconuts down and opening them for their water and flesh.

One of our local friends taught us to eat the green tree ants (weaver ants). These little green ants are everywhere in Australia, and they are vicious. Instead of digging through the ground and making hills, they have something that more or less resemble a hive made of dead leaves stuck together on trees. To try a bite of green tree ants, bite off the green sac on the back. (do kill it first so it doesn't suffer too much) The taste is citrus like, almost like a lime. These ants are high in vitamins and has also been used by aboriginals of australia in the past for medicinal purposes.

As we walked back from the track we are surrounded by butterflies in the woods. So many that they made a bare tree appeared to be lush with leaves.

that night our friends retrieved the crab trap they had set. It was filled with crabs but the big ones were all female and the male were just too small to fit legal requirements. So all the crabbies got a second life and we got a great laugh.

The second day we went out to explore the renown colored sand ( a short drive or walk away). We climbed up and up on rocks that crumble into sand if you're not too careful. The colors are in distinct hues of red, orange, yellow, white, and even black. On our way up, we met an aboriginal man from another community traveling here and collecting sand in hopes to use for painting. We climbed to the top and looked down upon the wonders of nature. All the boys in our group ran all the way down through a great slope of sand and back onto the beach.

(below: the little black dots on the edge of the water are Chris and our new friends Eden and Jay. That's how high the slope was.)

To show you how pigmented the sand is, chris put some on his arm to get a nice red color out of them.

The water at the end of the colored sands is crisp and clear. We chased and grabbed blow fishes and scooped up sea cucumbers. To end a jolly time, we noticed the abundant amount of still green mangoes on a huge mango tree. Perhaps if we came a bit later in the year we could even taste some of that juicy fruit.

We need food to nurish our body more than the simple chemical compounds that supports our cells. Eating serves us in a deeper level, it is also a gesture in honour of the lives we live. That belief brings us to dedicate a whole day in the area of the twelve apostles on a little food escapade.

To boost tourism, farmers from the little towns located not far from the Twelve Apostles created a chain of specialty food businesses as attractions.

We had just enough time and budget to visit the following three:

George Chocolates

Apostle Whey Cheese

Newtons Ridge Estate Winery

on George Chocolates website, a list of other attractions are also provided

George Chocolates has a wonderful and adorable selection of yummy chocolates with free samples for their most popular selections. The only disappointment is that the chocolate wasn't made at the farm, it is just a side business for the owners.

Our visit to Apostle Whey Cheese was a more unique experience in comparison to the chocolate shop. Surrounding the path from the car park to the shop are the most amazing copper sculpture collection!. The dairy farm sells both home made cheeses and milk. The girl behind the counter walked us through a mouth watering cheese tasting (FREE OF CHARGE!). I felt like I was one of the white hat members in the movie Box Trolls. Just as we worried about the transportation of cheese while we travel, the owner suggested us to buy a small cooler bag and reusable icepack for $3. We gladly purchased a slice of lucious blue cheese as we head down to Newtons Ridge Estate Winery.

(note: We passed on the milk. It is from a distributor that pastorizes milk from all over the country, so it's technically not the milk that's produced from the cows you see through the shop window.)

We arrived at Newtons Ridge Estate Winery just at the little down time. The owner of the shop walked us through the variety of wines they house as we chit chatted throughout the experience. The wine from this region is dry, especially so due to recent droughts. Since we were the only customers at the moment, she taught us the various details of wine making. We talked about the ages of various wines from various regions as well as how barrels affect wines through its fermentation. She gave us information on work in vineyards, unfortunately the time we have arrived is at the end of grape picking season so not much work was available. She generously shared the last drops of the grape juices that was collected for the season, it was pure ecstacy. We purchased our bottle and settled at the picnic table outside the shop. The wine and cheese created fireworks on our palates as we gazed out onto the rows of vines. We met some Japanese travellers during this time and put a perfect ending to our day.

a couple more pictures from the winery:

After our night in Apollo Bay we headed Westward onto The Great Ocean Road to grasp a grand view of the Twelve Apostles, a series of limestone pillars shaped by constant beating of tides and waves. On our way there we stumbled upon The Great Ocean Road Wildlife Park in Princetown, yet another gem to mark on our map.

Entry to the park is only $17 AUD per adult. The park is much larger than you would expect, judging from the entrance. As we entered the park we were greeted by its feathery host with a high pitched "hello". Wooden signs guilded us safely to the various sections of the park.

The variety of animals available is astounding for a small private owned park. Within their petting zone alone there are wallabies, kangaroos, emus, deers, lama, peacock. Most places would charge extra for any sort of petting and feeding with animals, but this place does not impose any extra cost. The people who have built this park truly cared for the wellbeings of the animals, most animals are allowed to roam free in the park. The only animals that I recall being caged are the dingos, but that is simply due to the carnivorous nature of these animals which could pose a threat to the other residents in the park. These dingos are domesticated and were raised on the property. Instead of commodification of these animals, The Great Ocean Road Wildlife Park embodies the values these precious lives provide.

The only dissapointment is that we were unable to see any koalas. The owners of the park have applied for hosting koalas in the park but have been denied. While we are dissapointed at the fact, news everywhere is suggesting that the government is culling koalas due to overpopulation in certain areas. The logic imposed makes little sense to us, but I guess every government is flawed and inefficient one way or another.

I highly suggest a visit to this park for a great intimate experience with the animals and to show some support to the works this park is endeavoring to accomplish.

here's all the cuteness: