Australia celebrates Labour Day on October 4th and I also got Friday, October 1st, off due to my work schedule. With a nice long weekend coming up, we decided to head to Lightning Ridge with one of my coworkers, Marc. We took off early Friday morning because it's an all-day drive.
We swung down south towards Newcastle and then headed west towards Maitland. We'd been to Maitland before when we were shopping for furniture and through it once when we went on the winery/brewery/chocolate factory trip. It wasn't long after we got out of Maitland that we started to hit territory that was new to us. We soon went by some seriously huge coal mining areas. They sure have a lot of coal here.
We stopped in Denman to get a better map, moved on through Merriwa, and decided to stop for lunch in Dunedoo. We ate at an old cafe that had a sign above the counter that said, "We serve good food, not fast food." They were true to their word and, thankfully, it wasn't that slow.
Back on the road, we worked our way through Mendooran and at Gilgandra we made the turn toward the north. The towns were getting smaller and smaller and farther and farther from one to the next with nothing much in between. We had seen a fair number of kangaroos although it was sad to see the inordinately large number of kangaroo carcasses by the road. We also discovered a cloud of locusts doesn't look or sound so good on the windshield - what a splat!
Somewhere between Gilgandra and Coonamble I saw my first wild emu! We saw a few more here and there as we passed through Walgett and finally arrived at Lightning Ridge. That was way cool!
The Lightning Ridge Motel will never be compared to even a Motel 6, but it's about the best the town had to offer. We found ourselves laughing at what we found. Eric said the bed looked like an old swayback horse. It had two serious divots that said just a few too many people had slept here, yeah, like a few thousand too many.
We had dinner and then checked out the social scene - the motel bar seemed to be the gathering place for many of the townspeople. We joined in their raffle although we wondered what we'd do if we won since the winners got either a meat tray or vegetable and fruit tray. We didn't win which was just as well, but it was entertaining. For the record, the meat trays all went before any of the vegetable trays were picked which bore out the sentiment expressed by one winning Aussie bloke who said, "I don't want no ?&$# veggie tray".
The next morning we hit a local cafe for breakfast and pumped the locals for information. We enjoyed talking to them and as it turned out, one of them ended up being our tour guide at the Chambers of the Black Hand Mine tour. He was a character who had enjoyed some success in his many years of opal mining. He said he and his mining partner were called the Holic brothers - he was the workaholic and his partner was the alcoholic! Cute!
We learned that the opals are found about 30-60 feet down at the bottom of what used to be an inland sea. The opals are found in two ways - seams and "nobbies". Nobbies are lump-shaped opals with a rocky covering. They find both white and the more rare black opals in Lightning Ridge. The Chambers of the Black Hand Mine is no longer actively mined and is now full of sculptures in the sandstone that have been done over the last 13 years by the owner. It's pretty darn amazing.
We next hit the Bevan Cactus Garden. Oh my gosh! I was in hog heaven! What an incredible display of thousands of cacti in sizes I could scarcely believe. I chatted with the owner who was a nice lady. She and her husband had done it together for years, but he died several years ago so the gardens are now his memorial. It was impossible to miss the great pride she had (and rightfully so) in what they had accomplished.
That was what impressed me the most about Lightning Ridge. The people there were so proud of their town and incredibly friendly. We had more than one person hint to us that it was a great place to move or retire to someday. We went to the Walk In Mine armed with the inside knowledge that we should ask for "Alex" to be our tour guide. In fact, Alex was the 11 year old son of the owner who has grown up in the world of opal mining and knows his stuff. Alex also desires to buy a Hummer someday and to keep him on the way to that dream, we paid a dollar each for the special tour.
After the tour we decided to try some of our own fossicking in the tailings from the mine. More on that tomorrow.
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