The road to Broken Hill!

We saw a lot of the above road today.  In fact, nine hours of it in total.  Broken Hill is a mining town in the Outback of New South Wales.  The last place we saw before arriving at Broken Hill, was 200km before.  To make it seem even more remote, we were travelling on a ‘highway’, and one of the main routes into Broken Hill, yet we saw only a handful of vehicles, most of which were goods lorries.  I was a bit worried that we just going to find a ghost town when we got there.  Having a name like Broken Hill didn’t help, it hardly brings to mind an image of a paradise place.

I thought we were in the outback in Dubbo.  How very wrong I was.  As we travelled, the countryside changed yet again, to true outback scenery, ie very flat, very orange, very desert like.  Long long straight roads with not a soul to be seen.  Minor ‘roads’ leading off the highway which resembled dirt tracks.  What struck me was what it would be like to live on some of the ‘stations’ (farms?) in the outback (we saw the odd driveway and letter box but not a house in sight).  Imagine popping out to the supermarket and having to drive 250km.  We stopped to take a few photos en route - a couple of which can be seen below.  On a couple of occasions we saw our bearded dragon’s (beardie george) distant cousins basking in the sun on the road.  When we got out to look, they shot off into the undergrowth at very high speed.  Our beardie would have been put to shame.  Chris also reckons he saw a (live) kangaroo.  I’m not convinced.

Bearded Dragon Sunbathing

Service Station!!

The view from the car!

 

I scared myself a bit by wondering what would happen if one of us got bitten by a snake or a scorpion - you can’t exactly just nip to the hospital.  We didn’t get out of the car so much after that.  It was a bit uncomfortable considering temperatures went up to 35C and we were abstaining from using the air con (saving money :) ) but we survived (although we weren’t much to look at).

It was fairly late when we arrived here in Broken Hill, so we have not had much chance to explore yet.  That will be tomorrow’s activity. In the meantime, I’ve uploaded a video we took of one of the monkeys in Dubbo Zoo. Hope you like it…