Broken Hill: The Silver City

As I wrote earlier in the last post, I’ve spent a week in Broken Hill. Though there are quite some things to do, I actually mostly spent my time wandering, and cycling, through the desert and looking at local stuff that was just around, instead of going through museums and art galleries. What’s surprising is that there’s actually a lot of wildlife going on in such a dry place, which might be because humans haven’t built everything full all around so the animals have more space to live. At a certain point, I even saw a couple camels walking around:

Quite a surprise when I saw this guy walking around

Aside from the wildlife, the surroundings themselves are really something that made the trip out there worth it alone. As I mentioned before, it’s really impressive to stand somewhere where there is nothing around you except for sand and some bushes. Though I’m not sure it shows what it’s really like, I made a panorama to give an impression (it’s not all around since then it would really become a ridiculously thin stripe): 

Pretty... empty

Ok, fair enough - it's not entirely empty, there are structures!

At one of my trips through the desert, I came across a sign saying “historic daydream mine”. Sounded pretty interesting, so I went ahead. Too bad they were just closing down for the day, but the good thing was there were some locals who ran a tour through the mine there, who not only offered to give me a ride (with my pushbike in the back of the car) back to Broken Hill (which saved me about 3 hours cycling) but also offered to give me a tour through the mine the following day (they even drove me up there!). You might not think them to be, but mines are actually incredibly interesting. The main thing they mined in the beginning was silver, which is why the nickname of Broken Hilll is Silver City. Lots of deaths, disease and money are involved, and during the tour of the mine it became pretty clear that mining is not really something that’s good for your health. Apparently you were lucky if you made it to 40 – since that was the retirement age for most miners. Most of them didn’t even make it.. This is talking about the 1900’s though, nowadays ofcourse this isn’t the case anymore. What surprised me when we went into the mine (we went about 30 meters deep) is how small it actually was! There’s hardly any places where you can stand up straight, and it’s corridors were really narrow too (I honestly think an obese american could get stuck there).

Not something they just placed there for tourists; they actually used this equipment right up until the mine closed down in about 1950.

This picture may be dark, and you can't see much on it - but that actually shows perfectly how it is when you're walking through the mine.

By now I’ve moved on again – and I’m now in Port Macquarie. This is about 400 kilometers north of Sydney (1500 from Broken Hill – another 20 hours of riding the train) and a nickname for it is the Koala Capital of the world. Needless to say, there are lot’s of koala’s here, but cool thing is they ‘re living in the town itself as well (in the parks, that is). Aside from having a lot of koala’s, Port Macquarie is also the place with the best weather for entire New South Wales this week, which will be my last week in Australia, and has about 9 beaches to enjoy it – with good opportunities to go (wind) surfing..