Mount Isa “big smoky city” in the outback

Mount Isa is one (maybe the only one) of the “big” cities in the Outback. The population of 20.000 people is compared to the thousands of kilometres around huge.
There we got for the first time after our start from Cairns mobile phone reception, …a great moment ;-)! As well we got some pizza, found a laundry and an internet cafe. We visited a little exhibition about the flying doctors, an organization founded in 1928. They fly through the outback and the little islands all over Australia and do medical care in cities with sometimes only two habitants. Very interesting! We tried to go out and find some interesting places in the city but there were only member clubs and they had a really strange crowd in our eyes that we left after only five minutes to better go to bed early.
The next day we did a mine tour, we even had to wear some mine cloth including a safety head and boots. As you can imagine it looked quite funny. Mount Isa is famous for its mining because their mine is the biggest mine of Australia and maybe the world. They get four different material from the mine: silver, zinc, copper and something else. Unbelievable and fascinating to hear all the stories from a local guy who used to work over 30 years in this mine. And he also showed us some of the mine cars, hey, they were really loud down there.