From Sydney to Broken Hill

What seemed like a small detour on the map, turned out to be a long journey from Sydney to Broken Hill, a goof size inland city of New South Wales that lives mostly from the silver mining industry.

It took us 4 days to drive the 1,200km that separate both cities. We didn’t drive very far on our first day and stopped at the Blue Mountains National Park just west of Sydney. It is a beautiful park with many nice walks through the gum trees forest and up the hills to the Three Sisters view-point. There, we spent our first night in the Dingo Space Rocket, in the middle of the park, surrounded by Eucalyptus trees.

We continued our way driving through Bathurst stopping at a farm, and Dubbo where we spent the night by the river, after having been completely ripped off (12$) to visit an old women’s garden full of decorations of all kinds, and the bottle house she built with her husband.

It was then another 4 hours drive the next day to reach Cobar, also a mining town, where we were able to overlook the whole of an operating gold mine. Cobar is a typical outback town with not much around but red earth and bush, a lot of flies and kangaroos. We stayed the night, at a nice free campsite by a recreational lake the community had built, home to many kinds of birds.

The next day, we drove 5 hour through pretty much nothing but flat country bush landscape before we made it to Broken Hill, a big country-style city of 20,000 inhabitants, large streets and beautiful colonial style buildings.

The same evening, we headed to the Living Desert park just outside the city for sunset, with view on the Australian Outback and carved rock sculptures.

It had not rained in the region for over 3 months, but the day had been quite hot and stormy and we arrived at the sunset spot under a thunderstorm and heavy rain. We waited patiently in the car and were rewarded with the most amazing full rainbow on the east, and the red sun showing through the clouds on the west.

Broken Hill doesn’t have any free campsite so we drove 5km out on the highway to the nearest rest area to spend the night. Not a bad stop but pitch dark, and having bought the wrong batteries for our outdoor lantern, we cooked outside in the completed darkness of the desert. I just had my phone’s light to make sure no snakes or big spiders were around and other flying insects would not fall in the cooking pot.

There were so many bugs flying around us and crawling up everywhere that we ate in the safeness of the car, and eventually found a big bug in our pasta…