Travelling Hopefully - Playing Around

 "Would you like to walk through an abandoned mining tunnel?"

"I'd rather drill a hole in my head," replied the retired diplomat.

With our obligatory and, to be honest, rather perfunctory offer my correspondent and I happily deserted the retired diplomat for the second time in about six hours.  By this stage she's entitled to have some severe abandonment issues.  We also temporarily abandoned Strahan.  Yes we left the glittering seaside lights and returned to Zeehan.  The phrase "returned to Zeehan" isn't one you're likely to hear to often in your life so make the most of it.

In truth we didn't so much return to Zeehan as drive through it.  Our destination was the abandoned Spray Silver mine just on the other side of Zeehan.  Guess what they mined there.  The name is a shameless marketing ploy.  It was the habit at the time to give mines catchy and vaguely ejaculatory names in the hopes that investors would be inspired to pour their money into what was literally a hole in the ground.  If I ever discover silver I'm going to call it Orgasm Argentum.  The prospectus practically writes itself.

We couldn't get into the actual mine of course, that is worked out, closed off and covered in bush.  Rather we were invited (and by invited I mean nobody stopped us) to walk through a tunnel that used to be used by the trolleyway that hauled the ore away to be tortured until it gave up its precious cargo.

There is no location so bleak, desolate or lost to civilisation that it doesn't have a golf course.  So we turned left at Zeehan Golf Course and eventually ran out of whatever the Zeehan equivalent of civilisation is.  Ahead of us loomed the Spray mine and the terrors of the old tunnel.  It was all rather like an episode of Scooby Doo although not one of the better ones.

We cross the grim brick portal and were instantly plunged into pure Stygian darkness.  Well pure Stygian darkness except for the literal light at the end of the tunnel (which is only about a hundred metres long).  That light provided a goal but didn't help with the actual seeing what we were doing right now.  With wincing care we shuffled blindly along trying not to fall off the duckboard into the eternal blackness.  Seconds passed, seconds filled with ragged breathing and a mounting sense of existential dread.  The blackness seemed to call us with a ghastly siren song of horror.  Slicked with sweat we stumbled towards the faint, mocking promise of the light.  Oh, and we stopped for a selfie along the way.

Once outside there wasn't a lot to do except turn around and go back.  Stygian darkness, existential dread etc etc.  We did poke about the bush uncovering random bits of mine workings and equipment.  Mining companies aren't exactly famous for cleaning up after themselves.  We also didn't see a platypus in a nearby creek.  Finally we had to admit it.  We were going to have to return to Strahan and face the wrath of the retired diplomat.

"We're going to see a play tonight," announced the retired diplomat upon our arrival.  My correspondent and I looked at each other in slight confusion.

"Are we?"

"Yes we fucking are."

So we went to a play.  Or rather we went to see The Play.  The Ship That Never Was has been running continuously in Strahan since 1994 which makes it Australia's longest running play.  I don't want to spoil the story in case you find yourself stranded in Strahan and suicide is against your religion but its about a bunch of convicts who built a boat, stole said boat, got arrested and sentenced to death for the preceding and then it turned out that there wasn't a boat after all.  It was actually immense amounts of fun.  There is a lot of that customer humiliation which is normally dignified with the term "audience participation" (I made a great helmsman) and since we're still in the throes of an epidemic the action would stop every so often while cast and crew (and random audience members) applied hand sanitiser.  Fortunately its the sort of play that isn't appreciably harmed by such interruptions.