Day 175 Broken Hill

Sunny day to explore Broken Hill and the surrounding area: Broken Hill is another old mining town, so first stop was at a car park with old Mining things on display. For our next stop we drove to the line of Lodge Reserve up the Miners Hill. At the moment the Miners Hill is a big construction site, but you can still walk around and have a look at the big bench and some old mining machines, but you cannot get close to them. At one end there is a Miners Memorial, where all death caused directly or indirectly by mining are listed from early 1880s till today including site and cause of death. On the drive up to the Memorial you can see also an old Mining Site, but the tours are not operating anymore.

For our next stop we were driving out of town to the old mining town of Silverton. This town is no ghost town, as there are some empty historical buildings e.g. the city hall, but also a hotel, a pub and of course a bakery. Surprisingly there were also some donkeys in the street, so Stuart went for the bakery to get a chocolate ice-cream shack and a Donut to watch the donkeys. Nowadays the town is known to be used for different movies, so there are some movie things on display and there is a Mad Max 2, the movie cinema. Some places looked a bit strange, such as the art cafe. The city sign with the mining, railway and movie symbol describes pretty accurate the history and what you can see nowadays in this town.

For the late afternoon we drove to the Living Desert State Park. There are 12 different sculptures made by people from different countries on display on a small hill. Stuart was very impressed by all these sculptures and was able to identify the sculpture he has seen the other day on the New South Wales Welcome sign on the drive to Broken Hill.

As the Living Desert State Park was on a small hill, we thought it is probably a great spot to watch the sunset as well. Stuart discovered on the search for the perfect spot to watch the sunset bush tomatoes, some still green, some almost red. The sunset from the Living Desert State Park turned out to be pretty spectacular, so a great finish of our time in Broken Hill.

On our drive back to Broken Hill, we discovered a house with lots of lights: Australians love Christmas Lights and this yard had lots of Christmas Statues on display.