Lightning Ridge is unique. Seven hundred kilometres from Sydney it feels like the outback but in Australian terms of distance it isn’t, really. An ironstone ridge rising from a floodplain it attracts lightning and thus the name.The Ridge is an opal mining town where people live above ground usually beside their mines. Unlike the opal towns of Coober Pedy and White Cliffs where they prefer to live underground because of the hot climate and the dry air in their mines. To the tourist it is a town of characters and eccentrics and never knowing whether the scruffy bearded guy in … Continue reading Lightning Ridge

There’s a shop in town called Mr Cheap and he advertises that he sells everything that a caravanner needs so we put him to the test. Just when we thought that we couldn’t find anything we realised that we needed solar lights for our guy rope pegs. Now where have I seen those lights recently? That’s right, the Bourke cemetery. Mr Cheap sells artificial flowers too. Continue reading Alight in Lightning Ridge