Moree and Inverell, Pt 181, April 16^th and 17^th Pictures

            Reluctantly leaving Lightning Ridge behind, we headed back south on the Castlereagh Highway and then east on the Gwydir Highway.  (They do have numbers-55 and 38 in this case- but the road signs use the full name.  I guess anything less is considered crass.)  Not far past the turn we found ourselves traveling alongside a huge field of cotton that was lined by suitably huge white bales.  Each would fill a whole flatbed trailer and they stretched forever down the side of the field.  We were in cotton country.  The side of the road was white with the stuff, especially near the occasional cotton gin plant.

            Cheryl studied a map book Peter and Emilda had back in Brewarrina that showed where all of the camping and rest stops were.  Cheryl picked out one called the Gum Flat Reserve.  We bought some ice and filled the autogas tank in Moree and drove along the Gwydir River till we found the road.  It headed over a cattle guard and along the river.  The first spot we saw was pretty trashed out, so we drove further into the reserve.  We scared up hundreds of probably feral goats along the way.   After some searching, we decided on a spot with a view of the river.  Seeing one flowing was heartening in itself.  The bad news was that with so many goats overgrazing, every plant that survived near the ground had thorns.  After we stopped I pulled cactus pieces, burrs, and bush thorns out of the Nissan tires (and some that had punctured Cheryl’s light rubber soled Nothinz - Croc-like-shoes).  Luckily there were no leaks in the tires and Cheryl had better soled sandals handy.

            The next morning the sunrise over the river was spectacular.  Joining in the festivities were flocks of Galahs and pink Cockatoos wheeling round from tree to tree and the goats grazing at a safe distance from our camp.  I took pictures of it all.

            The first town up the road was Warialda, another mostly Aboriginal town.  Further on, we almost hit a long necked turtle crossing the road.  By the time we had pulled over, a truck was bearing down right on it.  It ducked into its shell and survived.  We went back and moved it off the road but couldn’t wait long enough for it to stick its neck out again.  We stopped in a park just up the road at Delungra.  Cheryl spotted a giant moth, almost as long as a ball point pen, in the loo.  (The toilets really are mostly very clean but things do get into them.)  I was reading up on Inverell, the next large town in a booklet from an i(info) Center and discovered that Inverell is the “Sapphire City”.  There are sapphire mines and fossicking sites all around it with not just sapphires, but topaz, zircons and diamonds.  Not only were the sights getting really interesting, the countryside was beginning to look idyllic.  The grass was green and tall.  The trees were healthy.  The pastures were not overgrazed and there were crops of sorghum, corn and sunflowers.  We turned at a round-about (keeping left of course!) planted with bright flowers and stopped at the huge Inverell visitors’ center in a park next to the MacIntyre River, that was actually flowing.

The visitor center was not only big, it housed an extremely nice collection of rocks, cut gems and minerals. I’ve included a picture of the agates, (probably from Agate Creek). They also had a large collection of rutilated quartz (crystals with needles of other minerals imbedded in them), another product of Australia, sapphires of course and great mineral specimens from around the world. You could even buy bags of “sapphire gravel” and sift through them yourself to pick out the sapphires.

They had local wine, pecans and olive oil for sale too. We had not intended to stay long but I decided we should check out this sapphire thing for ourselves and picked out a place to visit on our way to Glen Innes. We headed out along the main highway through town called “Fossickers Way”. Soon we turned off on a pleasant country road and over some small hills to Billabong Blue Sapphires, http://billabongblue.fossickingpark.com.au/.

It had a circle of caravans and cars around the campfire pit in the middle of the parking lot, a lower level where the fossicking was going on, and a rustic shop where Rhonda, the owner, held sway. I explained to her that we didn’t have time to do much fossicking but I wanted to take some pictures and do a story for our rock club newsletter back home. She was happy to let us visit with her clients and suggested that we talk to a gal out fossicking below, named Carrie, about how to find sapphires.

Carrie was happy to show us the ropes. She also showed us a very nice dark blue sapphire she had found previously and had cut to make a pendant necklace. Having a mine where sapphires can be found is just the beginning. Sapphire gravel is much like any other gravel. It is dirty and dusty with rocks of all sizes. Sapphires are normally not very big. So the first step is to shovel some of the dirt into a sieve, pick out the big rocks and shake out the dirt. Next you need to wash the gravel to get the dirt and dust off. They had big round troughs of water for this. Shaking the sieve in the water moves the heavier stones, including the sapphires to the center. This gravel also had zircons and topaz that were worth saving. Then they used 55 gallon barrels with some heavy burlap on the top to spread out the contents of the sieve in the sunlight. Without strong light, it is hard to see that the sapphires are clear. They look black until you hold them up to the sunlight. Even after you have a collection, the best ones need to be cut and polished to bring out the color and clarity. It takes a lot of people to get it done. We wandered around the park a little and were looking at some washed gravel with another customer, when Cheryl picked up a pea-sized stone and noticed that it had one flat side with a radial pattern on it. This turned out to be a star sapphire. My picture doesn’t do it justice. Too bad we didn’t have time to find a few for ourselves. Just before she put the kettle on the grate over the campfire (for tea, of course) Rhonda gave us a small bag of sapphire sand to pick through and we were on the road again.

All this put us behind schedule and we were low on autogas when we got to Glen Innes. We tried to squeeze the Nissan and caravan through a small gap behind a “road train” (a semi with a long trailer) that was blocking the only entrance to the only autogas pump in town. We made it except for a fiberglass reflector stake (pretty much like the ones along our highways) that scraped the side of the caravan. Complaining to the big ugly truckie (truck driver) about it merited us a string of unintelligible Australian vitriol, definitely our worst experience of the trip.

We were glad to finally pull into Girraween National Park, just over the Queensland Border, with hot showers and thornless camping spots.