Broken Hill and Port Lincoln

One very average sniffle filled sleep later it was day again, time to continue to Broken Hill. I took the reigns of Bumble bee for a while and we drove to Wilcania. If you ever get the chance to stop and have lunch there like we did, DON'T its a decrepit old town and hasn't got much to offer eccept boarded up windows and a disgusting pond like creek. I didn't like it and i was scared Broken Hill would be much the same.
Wrong!! Broken Hill was a great place. We arrived there at night and set up base in Kathini's Living room, Kathini is a life long buddy on Mik's and she was a very gracious host and tour guide. After another snuffly sleep i woke up early and went for a drive. I ended up at Macca's and had a coffee, i then decided i should go to Big W to buy some undies (say no more) and turns out i was too early for Big W to be open. I waited out the front like a looser until the store opened and i got what i was after. By this time Heff and Nels had found me and we all went back to the house.

After we all were ready we piled into Thini's car and began the tour. First stop was the top of the line of lode, i think its a pile of dirt dug out of the mines. Its in the middle of town and has an oversize bench seat i didn't get any photos of this but i probably should have, meh oh well. The next stop on the tour was another area of dirt just out of the town. It is in this position that i took the following panorama image.



oooooooh dryness (click to enlarge)

Next stop Silverton, this place is where alot of films set in a desert are filmed, Mad Max, Priscilla and lots more we stopped in at the silverton hotel to check it out. Mik Heff and Nelson were all up for the free beer challenge at the bar i opted out because Partially because i still didn't feel well and i knew what was coming, And partially because I'm a party pooper.
Anyways the point of the challenge was this, the bartender put a funnel down the front of their pants and a potato on their foreheads. They had to move their heads down so that the potato would fall into the funnel. The trick of it all was that when they had the potatoes balancing on their heads the bartender poured water into the funnels. HAHAHAH i laughed i think they knew what was coming but did it anyway in good spirits, they all received a certificate and a free beer, mind you the free beer was poured into a shot glass, just the final nail in the coffin of humiliation they were being buried in.

Some replicas of of the interceptor and another Mad Max Esq buggy

The love child of the interceptor and a vw beetle

After the silverton hotel we went and checked out an art gallery still in silverton, had some pretty cool art i bought a couple of postcards. When we had concluded oogling the pretty pictures we clambered back into Thini's car and headed for the next part of the tour LUNCH. Chips and gravy were the order of the day and boy didn't the troops love it. Nelson and Heather opted to stay home for the next part of the tour, because Nelson was feeling crook. It was quite unfortunate for them because they missed some truly inspirational art.
Thini's took Mik and i to the tourist info centre to hire a set of keys for the sculpture symposium, sounds awesome and it was. The statues were created as a workshop by artists from all over the world, I think the workshop ran for about a week and the end result was these monolith type sculptures standing proudly in a high point of the desert. The seemingly random location and baron landscape really make the sculptures stand out, almost give them some sort of significance separate to what the sculptures had intended, or maybe my bullshit gland is in full swing, irrelevant really fact of the matter is i enjoyed the sculptures alot and i wish Heff and Nelson had seen them.

Family portrait

I think this one was called horse head, dunno why?

This one was by an Aztec sculptor and was my favorite

You can fit your arm through that whole, in case you were wondering.

 Hmmm were did we go from there, only the biggest canvas painting in the southern hemisphere, i took a sneaky video of the room it was amazing. We walked through the gallery and into a cave like area, it had some indigenous Australian style art on the walls, once we were through the cave the was a deck, kind of like a patio with a roof the deck lead to a rotunda and the view was an almost 360 hand painted canvas of the broke hill area. In the foreground in front of the canvas was some taxidermificated animals and various pieces of nature found in the area. If you have a look at the video you might figure out what I'm talking about.

It was awesome, again it was a shame Heff and Nelson missed out, tut tut tut.

After the massive canvas viewing we were ready for some snacks so we headed to the other side of town, on the other side of the line of lode and found "Bells" it's a 50's style milk bar that still make authentic 50's style drinks and treats i had a Cream soda spider i think it gave me diabetes but it was delicious. After the drinks we were ready to call it a day and headed back to Thini's for some Bourbon and a viewing of the Repo Man movie.

What an awesome surprise Broken Hill was i am really happy we spent a couple of days there and it's somewhere i could easily go back to. Sturt desert pea anyone?



vibrant no?

 The very next morning the wolfpack arose to the smell of bacon and eggs, Kathini is an awesome hostess. After breakfast and goodbyes we hit the road again. This time we thought we could do an all day burn all the way to Port Lincoln. It wasn't very hard except for the boringly straight roads of S.A. the highlight of the trip was crossing over the Finders Range it was really cool. The view looking out after the range onto the ocean was spectacular. Down here in S.A. the outback runs right up to the ocean, very different to what I'm used to grain fields running right up to the sand of the beach, a vast contrast to the Lush density of North Queensland. We kept on trucking through the afternoon and part of the night until we arrived in Port Lincoln. Just in time to help my bestie Amber celebrate her Birthday, we partied for a little while and then collapsed after a big day of driving. Cheers.