Yesterday in the morning, we were standing on the Tropic of Capricorn in Rockhampton, then later we arrived at the Blue Gem, which is a petrol station as well as a caravan park in Sapphire, in the middle of Queensland. This was after I was used by a bat as its toilet during our brief stop at Duraringa. After a good night’s sleep, we were off in the car trying to find the place where we could fossick for gems.  After about an hour of searching, we found it. Then we met Keith, the all mighty fossicker who showed us how to mine and what to look for when trying to spot sapphires. We dug from 9:30am to 2:00pm, and in this time we found 8 gems, 2 of them were big enough that we would be able to cut them. Warning, mining is hard work, do not try it at home! It must have been really hard back in 1875 when sapphires were first found here and this is now called the Queensland Gemfields.