It’s been a long hiatus between posts and much has happened since my last post. After leaving Tassie and returning to my van in Learmonth near Ballarat I sold my Landcruiser 200 series and prepared the Troopy for an adventure – the big lap of Australia in the troopy. Well at least that was the plan, however, things don’t always turn out how you plan them and I’m not sure whether I’ll make it around as I’m moving too slowly yet again.
Back in Victoria and I’ve been rather slack in not posting on the blog for well over a month. I spent about a month in the vicinity of Tingha fossicking for many different shiny rocks and I had planned to write a very long blog post explaining my fossicking experiences around the area. I have written a lot of the post, but it’s taking a long time and I haven’t organized much in the way of any photo’s for the post either, so we’re skipping it for the moment, to be finished at a later date.
Lighting ridge is a town of contrasts, the worlds largest producer of black opal, it’s known throughout the world as one of the highest quality opals you can buy and as such demands a price. A piece of quality opal the size of your fingernail can cost thousands of dollars, so you might expect that there would be a huge mining industry surrounding it yet the opal mining industry is a little like the wild west, at least it is around Lightning ridge.
I thought I’d come back to “7 Oaks” just outside Inverell for a few days to get some more sapphires, but in the end I decided to stay for 10 days. Hey I was getting stones, and who knew if I was ever going to make it back here to get any more. The weather was freezing cold, it rained to the point of almost flooding, it was muddy and dirty and the work was hard and physical.
Unfortunately I’ve been fairly rushed through the state of New South Wales because I needed to get up to Queensland for caravan modifications, the van was booked in and I had to make it here for the appointed date. So here I am now sitting in a hotel room just outside of Brisbane, I’m homeless in a different state, and only just writing up about New South Wales.
Welcome to NSW and to Bega! It started to rain a few days before I hit NSW and my drive into Bega which is in the south of the state was a wet one. Over the first three days in the state it has rained fairly constantly, Bega has received almost 300mm in three days. According to the news it’s the worst low pressure system to hit the east coast of Australia in perhaps 70 years and it was interesting to be here in the middle of it.