We've arrived in a tiny town called Lightning Ridge which is a long way from anywhere in the remote outback. It's a traditional Australian mining town full of odd characters toiling away at holes in the ground looking for, and hopefully digging up, opals. The mines are small scale - none of the corporate actors like BHP, Rio Tinto, Xstrata, or Vale are here - and the operators come from dozens of different countries to try their luck. When we drove into town, I pointed to a church with funny writing on the building and it turned out to be Serbian Orthodox - in a remote outback town of perhaps 2600 people of all places on the planet!
The reason to come here is to 'fossick' for gem-stones (especially opal), savour a lifestyle reminiscent of a century ago when Australia's numerous mining towns were rip-roaring frontier affairs, and soak in the hot spa baths. The last time Max and I had a spa bath was two years ago at Leukerbad in the Swiss Canton of Valais, a much more up-market experience than Lightning Ridge, though the latter was in a sense more interesting sociologically. Max, by the way, loves collecting rocks, especially crystalline ones, and he has a very sharp eye for anything that sparkles. So we expect him to have some success in his fossicking over the next two days.
The only thing that jarred Max so far was the trip. The journey from Armidale to LR is about 380km in a straight line. Alas the trip was anything but straight and we took something like 560km to get here. One of the problems was that the Collarenebri to LR road was closed due to flood-waters and that added 70km to the distance as we had to detour via Walgett. The roads were often awful due to pavement damage caused by the year's heavy rainfall and serious flooding, the latter still hanging around 4 months after the event. Despite that, the speed limit our here is 110 kph and drivers regularly do 130 kph (80 mph). Max was not greatly enthused by the scenery - the dead-flat landscape and the endless trees and grasslands, all interspersed by the huge fields the farmers run. One today looked to be in the order of 10 sq km (4 sq miles), but others I could not accurately estimate looked a lot larger. The first picture shows the beautiful cloudscape and the scenery half way between Moree and Collarenebri on the Gwydir Highway,
Max perked up greatly when we saw a massive field of cotton (at least another 10 sq km of white bushes) and then some wild emus and other large bird-life. His enthusiasm grew when he found out that LR has a spa baths complex which is open 24/7 and is free. That was the first place we headed to after a hard day on the road and the next two photos show the large and small pools respectively, all out of doors - which is fine given the hot and generally dry climate. The waters were at the upper end of human tolerability and fed by deep bores into the underground artesian aquifers. The first of the two shows me and Max in the smaller pool designed for children. The large pool has very deep water in places. Both pictures were taken at dusk at a time of high usage by the local population.
Expect a few more posts in coming days.
AS
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