Central & Outback NSW 2021

We came the long way, but we've made it to Lightning Ridge!

We're staying the Opal Caravan Park, just 200m from the hot bore baths, and it's fabulous. We have a huge drive through site with our own ensuite.

'The Ridge' is unlike anywhere else. As a town, it is a bizarre and compelling combination of rural sophistication vs wildly eccentric. On one hand, the main street is sealed, curbed and guttered and has rows of regular shops - and evidently there is a lot of money around.

On the other hand, you gasp at the house made from bottles and the rough cement 'castle' of the Astronomer's Monument, surrounded by a moonscape of mullock heaps under which literally hundreds of obsessed miners search and dig for the black opals which have made the town famous.

We love all the quirkiness that Lightning Ridge has to offer. Everywhere you look there's a little joke or dig at conformity to be found if you open your eyes.

But perhaps the best part of the Lightning Ridge experience for me is sous-viding ourselves in the famous hot pool. The Lightning Ridge Bore Baths, which are the result of an artesian bore sunk by local graziers in the 1960s, provide a permanent supply of warm (more accurately described as HOT) mineralised waters bubbling up from 900m below the surface.

It is definitely a special experience to sit in the hot pool, especially on a cool April night, and gaze up at the vast outback skies. I've never been so completely relaxed, nor slept better. I could do this every night ☺️Read more