Today we did the Lightning Ridge car door tours. There are four trail, each one marked by a series of car door painted in that trail's colour: red, yellow, blue and green. One surprise for us was that they want you to give them a dollar for the info sheet, which was ok I guess. One thing that was not a surprise was the rudeness of the woman in the Info Centre, as they were just as unhelpful and rude 3 and 6 years ago. Maybe it's their idea of fun: annoy and ridicule the tourists who come in at the rate of 5-6000 a month.
I was going to present a pictorial coverage of the trails, but as it turns out, most of the explanations of each numbered door simple said to move on to the next door.
Anyhow here's a few just for fun:
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| Red door tail. Lightning Ridge, NSW |
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| Highest point on the ridge. Lightning Ridge, NSW |
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| Yellow door trail. Lightning Ridge, NSW |
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| Yellow trail. Lightning Ridge, NSW |
Lunatic lookout is a ledge at the top of the hill. The Three-mile mine area is at the bottom of the hill, and when some hardy souls decided to go up the hill and dig down, by hand, the extra 60ft to get to the same seam, they said they were Looney, hence the tag Lunatic Hill. Today it is one large open cut mine that cleaned out anything that the old-time diggers missed.
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Lightning Ridge, NSW
Faux church erected for some totally forgotten B grade movie |
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| Lightning Ridge, NSW |
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Lightning Ridge, NSW
OH&S has even caught up with the bears nailed to the trees |
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| View from top-of-the-ridge looking west. Lightning Ridge NSW |
No visit to Lightning Ridge is complete without a visit to the '2nd most unmissable attraction in NSW' aka The Chambers of the Black Hand. Which is one man's 20 year's worth of carving statues into the sandstone layer above the opal layer. We've been here before and it's changed a bit: there are more chambers, more carvings, no guided tour of the actual mine part, and they've whacked the entry fee up. But interesting enough, so a few of the carvings I haven't put up before
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| Chambers of the Black Hand. Lightning Ridge, NSW |
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| Chambers of the Black Hand. Lightning Ridge, NSW |
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| Chambers of the Black Hand. Lightning Ridge, NSW |
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| Chambers of the Black Hand. Lightning Ridge, NSW |
We made it back in time to catch another Mel and Susie show, which was even better than yesterday, and then we went and had a dip in the hot spring. H-O-T being the operative word here, it must have been 40+ and you just couldn't stay in more than a few minutes at a time.
We finished the day sitting around the campfire and swapping a few travel tales with our fellow drifters.
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