Road to Bingara

On Easter Sunday we decided to drive to one of our 'nearby' towns for lunch and Dot suggested Bingara. This little town of just 1300 people is near by our standards, but probably mind-blowingly far by UK standards. It's 150 km away, or nearly 100 miles. To get there we travelled mostly minor roads and about 12 km of that was unsealed dirt.

The route is linear NW from Armidale as shown on the attached map:

The first 75 km, which we've driven many times goes to the tiny settlement of Bundarra (pop c. 400) up Thunderbolt's way, named after the notorious bush ranger, Fred Ward - alias Captain Thunderbolt, who made a living holding up stage coaches. This happened long ago, so you're safe from such happenings these days. Bundarra is not shown on the map, but lies at the junction with the Inverell-Bundarra road.

We'd never driven the rest of the distance - another 75 km to Bingara, roughly in parallel with the Gwydir River, one of the major tributaries of the Darling river system. That flows into the large lake held back by Copeton Dam. We were stunned by the beauty of the scenery en route. And the rest of this post is dedicated to images from the journey:

Distant views of the Dividing Range (c. 1500 m high)

Long stretches of narrow road through scrubby forests.

Lots of glimpses of nearby forest-covered mountains.

Steep winding roads offering great views..

Pleasant views across rolling pastoral country.

Pastures and mountains near Bingara.

Cattle sheltering from the sun. Eat your hearts out. The temperature was a pleasant 25 C, even though we're towards the end of April (= October in the northern hemisphere).

Views back towards the Great Divide.

Nice, eh!

AS