Broken Hill

We left Adelaide for a couple of days on Tuesday to head upto Broken Hill which is an old mining town just over the border from South Australia into New South Wales.

I don't think I mentioned this before but South Australia is actually on a different time zone to New South Wales and Victoria being half an hour behind. Despite being 50km into NSW's Broken Hill keeps SA time therefore being out of sync with the rest of the state. What with daylight saving coming soon, but only in some states, there is actually six different time zones in Australia. They don't have daylight saving in Queensland because apparently it would fade their curtains or something!?

Anyway we got to Broken Hill where we were staying above a pub, of course, and decided to spend our first evening there doing a bar crawl around the some of the watering holes. We ended going into a place called Marios Hotel which features in the film Priscillia Queen of the Desert. For those of you who can't recall, it has murals of bush scenes covering every available wall space including a Venus style birth scene on the ceiling - a fairly surreal setting in an outback town.
After about six stops our crawl came to a finish as Rachael was starting to stagger and slur her words. I was a little upset by this as, having gotten into the Aussie habit of drinking pots (a half), we'd only had 3 pints each and I was planning on at least another dozen stops around town. Oh well an early night never hurt anyone.
That night it rained constantly for about 12 hours in a place which is basically in the middle of a desert, talk about taking the weather with you. As a result all the Mines were flooded and we couldn't do a tour - boo.

We headed out to Silverton instead which is famous as a location for several films and adverts. Most famously, in my mind anyway, as the setting for Mad Max II. For those of you who have seen the film and remember it.. well, you know the opening shot where Max is at the bottom of a hill collecting a bit of gasoline with a biker at the crest.... we drove down it - wuhoo, who would of though a bit of tarmac could be so thrilling! I actually chose this moment to display the lack of resemblance between Max and myself by driving with the handbrake on for a couple of kilometres - idiot.
Silverton is also home to a Coin Carver, in their we chatted to a guy who is the only person in Australia with permission to cut into the currency. He spends weeks cutting out all the background in old Aussie 1p pieces, leaving just the writing, rim and picture before covering them in silver which he then sells on at $150 dollars each on a necklace.

He also let us into an interesting fact, an Australian 20c piece (worth about 8p) is the exact same size and width as a two pound coin. In fact you can use a 20c piece in vending machines in the U.K. and it will take it as two pounds giving change accordingly.

We returned to Adelaide the following day in preparation for leaving on The Ghan (train) upto Alice Springs on the Friday.

That's all for now folks - take care.

P.S. Anyone who wants some 20c pieces I'll be charging a pound a pop plus freight, discount for bulk orders - everyones a winner!