Cobar is called “Copper City”. They found a bit of gold amongst the copper, but that was just used to defray working costs of the mine – a nice problem to have. Although the mines are mostly abandoned now, there still is a lot of copper still – the owners are waiting for the price to rise.

The heritage society had done a great job at rescuing the various artefacts. I fell in love with the fire engine.

I also really want this for my work chair. The red button on the right would be my “publish the new web site” button. I reckon two joysticks would be better than a mouse!

The road from Broken Hill to Cobar was astonishingly green. It had clearly rained a lot recently. As a result, we saw a lot of wild life on this leg – more than we had seen throughout Northern Territory and South Australia put together. The winner of the group was this spiky fellow. He began digging in when he saw Dog.

We saw a lot of emus, but this one had chicks so was quite hard to catch. Pardon the pixelation.

Dog could not get near these, so had to do with their smaller cousins

There were other young ones too

…and even some trees were in the mood for spring

We pulled over at Mt  Grenfell Historic Site to see the Aboriginal Art. The reserve was badly sign posted and we inadvertently took off on a 3 hour walk up a mountain and only discovered our error after 45 minutes. I suppose that would cost us $80 at a gym, so we should not complain, and we did get to see the art in the end too.

Unfortunately it as cold, windy and about the rain while we were up there, so we did not spend very long. (It seems odd that the rain on this trip was at Kings Canyon, Uluru and Broken Hill.)

On a good day, the hill would be worth a walk.

I did not test it with dog!

The Serbs went as far as to excavate a church from an old mine.

We tried our hand a fossicking – called noodling when you re-examine tailings.

I mostly found ochre, but we all bagged some interesting silca crystals.

To the north of the town are the stunning “breakaways”. I think I could dedicate a blog to that one. Here is a panorama I took – click for more detail.

Carmel and I had the brilliant idea of of organising a wine and cheese sunset viewing. Ash stayed at home to mind the dog.

From about 6:00 until 6:30, I stood up every few minutes to take another photo. The last couple clearly suffer from “clever smart phone photo colour correction”, but you get the idea

Also, Kata Tjuta was the western extent of our travels.

It did seem quite impossible when I planned the trip that we could arrive at the centre with a functional caravan, car and family! But I think you can see from our faces that we are delighted.

We opted for a walk around Uluru, which was surprisingly different from the warnings – we had no risk to heat stroke or dehydration in a light rain, strong wind and cold (perhaps 10 degrees) air, but we kept our pace up to stay warm and made the distance.

It is very hard to give a feel of this strange icon in photos. One of the guide books suggest that the best way was to throw away the camera and use the lens in our heart.

I tried a few shots with the smart phone and a panorama software package (Hugin – open source of course). However, the feeling of this rock towering over you and the different way it was eroding from every size is almost impossible to capture.

Large areas of the rock are not photograph-able, but you can see from the bits in this article, it is a different rock in different places.

Interestingly, the actual rock of Uluru is grey. The outside of the rock has had many of the minerals leached out leaving mostly iron that has rusted. You can see the actual colour of the rock below.

BTW, Ash was with us but did not want to be in any photos.

At the top there is a great view of the plain around.

You then walk through these amazing structures that change at different places, some are like beehives, others like wind carvings.

You get these views of the other cliffs with interesting “swiss cheese” erosions.

Depressingly, half way through the walk you come on a deep chasm you need to climb into and then our the other side – at that point of the work, every contour line is precious!

The walk was very unusual because it rained gently thoughout. As Carmel quipped “How many people have seen Kings Canyon in the wet!”

However, Ash did not mind and enjoyed the various shapes to explore

As did I

The most depressing part of the visit though was the diesel prices!