Hi everybody!
Back again in Australia. Martin picked me up from the airport in Sydney and we are travelling through the outback to Adelaide now. Two weeks are already over and a lot of things happend.
First of all we gave Martin's car a new outfit and got rid of the funny blue colour and the eyebrows at the frontlights.
After that we went west through the Blue Mountains to the Warrumbungle NP, an area with former vulcanic activity and beautiful landscape (see the first two pictures).
That's as well the place where we found the kangaroo with the joey in it's bag, very cute!
Afterwards we went on to White Cliffs, an opal town in the middle of nowhere. It's amazing, when you look around it's like standing on the moon. A lot of holes around (all the entrance-holes to the mines) and little hills out of white little rocks and dirt out of the mines. We got an private guided tour from Ron through his opal mine (picture 4, sorry I forgot to turn it). It's interesting, there lifestyle is completely different to what we know. He is digging since ~37 years and still motivated to find opals and he is indeed able to earn enough money for him and his family. The night in White Cliffs we stayed at the Underground Motel (it wasn't that expensive...), it's a 'dug-out'. All people living there have there homes digged in little hills, so they are living in underground houses. And theses dug-outs are really comfortable, they have ~22 degrees all time of the year and that's much better then the ~38 degrees we've had outside.
At the moment we're in Broken Hill, and nearby is a little 'ghosttown' called Silverton. More than 140 movies have been filmed here, for example "Mad Max" and the "Flying Doctor Service" series. It's a former silvermines town, but now there are only some artists living there. One is painting funny things, one is the emu-head, among others painted on the two VW-Beetle (last picture).
Now we are heading to Adelaide via Barossa Valley, where we'll taste some of the wines there.
Cheers!