Lightning Ridge NSW

After a lovely 2 days at Goodooga relaxing  and enjoying the artesian pool we made our way to Lightning Ridge. It was a town built on the discovery of the rare black opal in 1902. As we have visited before and explored other opal towns we didn’t feel the need to do the underground tours on offer here. 

We did go into John Murray’s art gallery and exit with a print of emus in a sunset that will evoke fond memories of this trip. 

At the tourist info we got a map of the ‘4 door’ self drive tours, named after coloured car doors- blue, red, green and yellow, each showing us different aspects of opal mining and some quirky buildings.

Along the Blue tour we drove through the suburb where miners live in their 50x50 lease.

The Red tour took us through Sim’s Hill, the area that was first settled. Ridge Castle is a home built from stones and bottles. 

We think that someone stole the KFC sign… haha.

Amigos Castle has been built from Ironstone.

We also passed the original bottle house as we ventured back into town.

The Green tour took us out to Nettleton’s First Shaft. 

We also saw the unique Beer Can House which made for some interesting photos.

Our last tour, Yellow, took us through some larger open cut mines to Lunatic Hill where the worlds largest black opal Nobby was found called Halley’s Comet.

On our way out we stopped by to see Stanley the Emu, standing at 18m high and constructed from old VW beetles and satellite dishes atop steel girders. 

We then turned off the highway to do the Orange Car Door Tour that’s starts in Garwin. We settled in for the night at the Club in the Scrub free camp… but that’s a story for next time…