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With the thrill of diving over we decided to go in search of black opals and sapphires, in the hope of hitting the big time, but as tourists and not caravan dwelling hillbillys. this meant a two day drive out to Lightning Ridge. We did have a slight fuel scare though but we managed to make it to st George, about 600 kilometer drive, from brisbane. the fuel light did tease us for the last 60 kilometers coming on and going off as we drove up and down hills and as our speed increased and decreased. We were below the empty line when we finally rolled into a petrol station.
We arrived in Lightning Ridge looking for giant pieces of opals but we only got to sift through the remains the miners didn't want, so only found a few tiny chips. They say once you arrive at ridge, "you never want to leave". We didn't quite understand that and left after taking a quick drive yourself about tour. The highlight of the town was their Artesian pool, an outside pool, using naturally heated water from the Artisan Basin directly below. We opted to go to Grawin as we'd been told that's where the opals are, it also ment taking the van slightly off road, something we'd been told not to do but on the promises of making a fortune we though it'd be worth it. Garwin is entirely devoted to opal mining, clearly all money is spent on digging as the people there mostly live in "shanty shacks". A few have the luxury of old caravans but they were few and far between. The van survived but we didn't find anything to turn us into millionaires. We left disappointed.
After reading about a town called Inverell and it being the sapphire city of the world, most sapphires get exported from there, we decided a last ditch effort in finding some precious stones would be too good to turn down. After a few hours of Ryan digging, washing and sorting, Maz picked through the 'wash' and found a (very) small haul worth being happy about. That's until we took them to a specialist who made 2 piles, lots in the worthless and 5 in the worth not so much, apparently we can send them to Bangkok for them to be cut but that'd be pointless!
Our next stop was Glen Innes, our last hope to find sapphires, it rained when we got there, whilst we were there and after we'd left........we only stayed the night, but in a campsite with hot showers, YAY!!
So our road trip into the big red center was unsuccessful and we didn't even get to stop in a place called Bald Knob. We've heard of a place you can go panning for gold, so could it be third time lucky? keep your fingers crossed.
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