All About Wine, PimP my UTE, Go West, The Planes, Mining Country.

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Im re-writeing a previous post that was lost when the town i was in got struck by lightining frying the internet caffe i was in.

Ariving at Arrowfeild in the Hunter Valey gives me stange feelings of De Ja Vu, its gently undulateing curves, brown dry land patchworked by vivid green irragated feilds and the vines in rows on every East faceing slope. It remids me of tuscany with bigger roads and stripmines, even the olive trees here seem very happy, with the horse stud next to Arrowfeild it feeles a bit to familiar.

We spend our time at the wineary prepareing of hard camping in the bush, we work out a packing system that just fits all out stuff in Betty. We check maps and talk to the farmers, paticuarly Tony (a very nice, late 30's chunky ozzy bloke, helpfull), who gives us a tip to visit the Malindi Lakes near Broken Hill.

We get the welding torch out and some angle grinders and spend a day PimPinG Up Ol BeTtY, we fit a cage on the back to stop anybody making off with our kit, it also turns the back into a flat tray that one of us could sleep on, this could be vital if we go to croc country. I add a small Union Jack to our aerial making her look a bit like an ambassadorial limmo!

We leave the wineary climbing up through the Hunter and over the top onto the great planes, we pass through 'Muggie' and 'Dubbo'. This is corn land, there are stubble feilds dissapearing into heat hase and horizon, the roads get streighter and emptier, the only features in this landscape are the grain silos and roadtrains.

Our detour to the Menindi lakes involves a lot of off road driving through bush and scrubb, ariveing hot, dusty and board at the vast terquoise lake was breathtaking. The lakes were man made about 75 years ago, they are a water source for Broken Hill and the grain plain, when they were flooded the old Gum trees died, but their bush fire hardend wood was not rotted by the saline lakes. The skeletons of these huge trees dott the lake side, their smooth silvery wooden bones sticking out of the flat terquoise water. We wade out to one of the trees and sit in the low boughs, take a beer and watch the sunset. Very Special.

As we roll on the soil color changes from the rich brown of the Huner, to a lighter sandy clay of the plain, then to the deep rich Iron Oxide red that predominates the rich mining area we enter. We pass towns called 'Buggie Buggie' and 'Neverend', and approach 'Broken Hill'.

The Hill brakes the horizon when were still 30k's away, we feel excited as we approach, Civilisation!! As we near it we realise that the hill is infact the slagg heap from numerous strip mines in the sorunding area. Broken Hill realy is a shit hole! We take a day to visit a abandond mine that used to run in the 1890's, im too tall for this, and put numerous dents in my tour issue tin helmet. The mine was mostly run by children and im on hands and knees a lot of the time, trying hard not the think about not thinking about rock and presure and things in the dark.

Next we head for the Desert a proper.....

(must appologise for eratic spelling, normaly rely on word and red lines, none avalable here)

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