Happy New Year to you all!!

We arrived in Lightning Ridge without incident after a one night stop over at a crappy Gilgandra caravan park. The road through to Walgett and on to Lightning Ridge is rather uninspiring. We have driven outback roads in the past and find the miles and miles of flat nothing-ness rather interesting, but this stretch of road is neither true outback or bush terrain, it is flat and straight for kilometres on end but has grassy plains and scrubby bush... hard to explain, but not a very interesting drive. Oh, and the "highway" is in rather bad condition, very bumpy and rough. After the obligitory photo at the welcome sign we made our way into town, stopped at the tourist info centre for, you guessed it, some tourist info, and took a touristy photo of ourselves behind the character board. Then we found a caravan park and set ourselves up, we ended up with a nice shaded site that even had some grass!! Lightning Ridge is not a big town, we walked around the main CBD in about 20 minutes, but it is well spread out. It is not quite what we expected. We had heard all the stories about it being a quirky outback town full of character, in a barren outback environment. As we had seen Coober Pedy in S.A on our trip to the Northern Territory a couple of years ago, we expected "the Ridge" to be vey similar. But it is quite different... Coober Pedy has no grass, at all, whereas there is plenty of grass around Lightning Ridge. They have a bowling club with manicured greens, a green rugby field and grassy nature-strip lined streets. Coober Pedy has red dirt, everywhere, and a couple of scragly trees here and there. The township of Lightning Ridge is definately not as "quirky" as Coober Pedy either, it has a more civilised feel about it and it is almost beginning to look like commercialism is about to take hold. We liked it though, it had a good vibe, the people are friendly and it feels safe, just not as "outback" as we had thought. This is why one travels, to find out about places for yourself. Lightning Ridge has it's famous Car Door tours, which we did most of. This involves getting a map from the tourist info, driving around town and out of it, and following particular coloured old car doors around the roads. The doors are all numbered and leaning against trees with arrows on them in true outback form. But be sure to get the coresponding sheet from the tourist info, it will tell you what you are looking at at the particular numbered door. We found this out after the first tour made no sense to us and we didn't have a clue why the doors would be numbered. A return trip to the tourist info had us pay the huge fee of 1 dollar for the coresponding sheet. Apparently, some people feel the fee is too much and dont bother buying it, which is why they don't offer it when you get the map. Seriously! The tours are worth doing, but the roads are not the best if you are sensitive to corrugations, rocks and dust. Our favourite thing in Lightning Ridge is the art gallery of artist John Murray. Now, I don't do art galleries, I just don't get most art, most of it is rubbish, paint thrown together by some moron that thinks painting like a metally challanged 5 year old is art. But this John Murray is a true artist. His paintings depict outback Australia, most with a bit of humour, and they all have so much detail in them that you can't help but keep looking at them. Really fantastic work, it's worth visiting Lightning Ridge for his gallery alone. I wanted to buy a painting of an outback road scene that was painted on 3 canvases, it would have been about 5 metres wide and 2 metres tall, but as we haven't quite enough room to fit it in the car, and we don't have the 12 grand asking price, I passed. Great painting though. Check out his website and you'll see what I mean, just Google "John Murray art".

On New Years Eve we took a drive out to the nearby communities of Grawin, Glengarry, and Sheepyard. This involved a drive about 70ish k's west of Lightning Ridge. Yes, there is life out there. There was a detour in place that blocked off the usual loop that can be driven to these places due to the road still being under water from the Queensland floods, in January 2011... almost a year ago!! It seems that the water flowing gently from the floods and sits in this nice gully that the road goes through, waiting to evaporate. But as they have had nearly double their yearly rainfall the past 12 months, the water has just stayed there. No wonder the place is full of mozzies!!! That's one thing I didn't expect from Lightning Ridge, mozzies. They were everywhere. The night that I took the photo of the church under the stars, they were swarming around and biting through my shirt, which was sprayed in aeroguard!! Anyway, back to the drive.... we visited the Glengarry Hilton, which is a pub in the middle of nowhere, which is where Glengarry is anyway. The pub is actually officially a bottleshop, there is no beer on tap, they sell beer as per a bottleshop because that's the licence they have. The "bottleshop" just happens to have a shed next door that strangely resembles a pub, complete with pool table, bar stools, jukebox and everything. There are photos all over the walls which show that the locals seem to enjoy themselves out here once they have had enough opal mining for the day. One old, half faded photo was of a huge wild pig hanging from a block and tackle set up on the back of a ute. A bloke was standing next to the pig, leaning on it with his arm, and it was longer than he was tall. There had been written on the photo "1985 wild pig 418 kilograms". I guess there may have been some inspiration for the Razorback movie.... Next was the Club in the scrub at Grawin, which is a registered club as per many other NSW clubs, but it is the only one remaining in NSW that has no form of gambling. Next it was on to Sheepyard for a drive-by the community and the pub and then we returned the same way we came. It was an interesting drive, seeing how some people live in a remote part of the country, driving around rough dirt roads in old un-registered bombs, living in complete shacks just to dig shiny rocks out of the ground... and it seems no-one is getting rich from this lifestyle, because any money made from selling opals no doubt goes into the pub. It seems like a strange existance to us, but you get the impression they are happy and wouldn't have it any other way.

NYE at Lightning Ridge was not what we imagined. There is no quirky, outback, Glengarry Hilton style pub like other outback towns, and the caravan park was quiet. There was a band on at the bowling club and that was it. All in all a very quiet NYE was had by us and we were in bed early. The next couple of days we had a lazy time, swam in the pool, sat in the shade and did b***** all, as you do when it's 38 degrees and you have nothing in particular that needs to be done. :)

We left Lightning Ridge on the 3rd of January and drove out through Collarenabri. This was another 100km of outback dirt road with a couple of water crossings included due to the water still lying around. Then it was on to Burren Junction, Wee Waa, and on to Narrabri. We had decided to stay in the Pilliga State Forrest at a free camp we picked out of the Camps 6 book. After a 60 km drive along a very straight dirt road we arrived the camp and set up. The Pilliga State Forrest had been changed to Timmallallie National Park at this point, so normal national park rules (and restrictions on certain activities) apply, which was a bit of a let down. But the camp was ok, with clean barbies and toilets. The next morning we were driving out and we came across two emus walking straight down the middle of the track. They were about 100 metres from us, I stopped the Pajero and turned off the engine, and the emus continued walking (cautiously) toward us until they were only about 10 metres in front of the car. We have video of it and will post it soon.

After a stop in Narrabri again for food and fuel, we went to Mt Kaputar National Park for a few days. This is a beautiful part of the world. Mt Kaputar is 1510 metres above sea level and you can drive to the summit. There are numerous walking tracks and a couple of good campgrounds. We set up camp at the Bark Hut camp which had hot showers and flushing toilets!! Flash!! It's funny how excited you can get over flushing toilets... We stayed 3 nights here and did a couple of the walks, which had us standing on the edge of the mountains overlooking the flats 1400 metres below us in beautiful sunshine. Awesome. The second night we experienced a very loud, close and awesome thunderstorm. It brewed up quickly around the mountains, turned the sky dark and started lashing us with lightning before we knew it. The joys of camping at altitude! We had lightning so close over our heads you could almost feel the heat off it, it made a noise like multiple rifle shots in succession as it whipped over our heads, followed by thunder so loud it made my lungs rattle. It was just awesome. It poured rain all night with mud flowing under our feet under the awning, then we woke to blue skies the next morning. We did another walk with another fantastic view that day, and packed up that arvo. The next morning we hooked on the camper again, drove back to Narrabri and out through the top end of Mt Kaputar NP. Here you find Sawn Rocks, which is well worth the visit. It is apparrently the best example of "organ piping" rocks in Australia. The rocks are running straight down a cliff face and resemble the organ pipes from a church.... not that I would know what that looked like! Some of the rocks have broken away and are sitting in the riverbed below, looking like the pillars to some lost civilisation buildings. Truly spectacular and well worth the visit.

From here we headed on to the Walcha area, passing through some beautiful undulating country west of Bendemeer (no - it's not where they bend the bananas... or so Kathy tells me, but I don't believe her, they have to be bent somewhere....). This route was partly taken as a bit of a short cut, but it ended up taking hours due to it being a narrow, rough dirt road that passes through farming paddocks. The surrounding country is the sort of place that we could live one day, Kathy has decided she wants a property she saw here called Moss Vale, but I don't think it will be for sale anytime soon.... We are now at the Walcha caravan park for a washing day, then we'll head bush again for a few days (or weeks) before getting to the coast.

We hope you are all well,

Paul and Kathy.