A very short drive from Broken Hill brought us to Silverton which was actually the first place silver was discovered around this area. However, once silver was found just up the road in Broken Hill the large operators set up there and Broken Hill became the big city leaving Silverton largely forgotten. 

Today Silverton is pretty much just a collection of a few art galleries and a pub in the middle of a vast expanse of red dirt. The art galleries are strange because, as far as I could tell, almost all the artists working in Silverton paint the same pictures of cartoon emus. Very odd, surely the person who thought them up first must get a bit miffed.
 Silverton is famous for something other than emu paintings and silver though, Mad Max was filmed there and it was easy to see why. There were almost no trees and the landscape looked pretty desolate as far as the eye could see. It was also hot, even though this was late autumn, with the sun beating down relentlessly on an area with very little shelter. 

When we were leaving the Royal Flying Doctor Service visitor centre in Broken Hill two coaches turned up from the Melbourne Probus Club. We patted ourselves on the back as we realised we had narrowly missed sharing our excellent tour with about seventy old people but our luck ran out in Silverton. We were about to go into the Silverton Hotel for a coffee when the coaches pulled up again and seventy octogenarians filed in ahead of us filling the place completely.
We decided not to bother and I had to be satisfied with hearing Ian's tales of his last visit there when a horse pushed its way through the saloon bar doors and made itself at home while he was having a beer. He mentioned this in one of the galleries and the owner told us that the horse was called Misty and he used to visit the pub all the time.
It was time to move on to our next stop in the opal mining town of White Cliffs, 250kms from Broken Hill. We decided to go the cross country way so the last 200kms were on dirt road.

 It was the worst road I have driven on so far and we had to keep a sharp lookout for sudden potholes and bits of road missing altogether, as well as avoiding kangaroos, emus, sheep, cows and a fox. Apparently the makers of driverless cars are having a real problem with Australia's unique outback driving conditions. It is the way kangaroos sort of fly through the air towards a collision that is causing the most head scratching. I hope they manage to solve the difficulty because Australia has more single person car accidents than anywhere else in the world, because of falling asleep, so the driverless car would appear to be a useful introduction. 

Anyway, we bumped and clattered into White Cliffs and found the caravan park which was great. It had good, clean facilities but was divided in two so the people who needed power were over by the shower block while those who didn't need power were over the other side where it was all red dirt surrounded by eucalyptus trees and felt more like camping out in the open. The other enjoyable bit about being in the non powered section was being able to watch the Serious Travellers set up. We just arrive, roll out the awning and chuck a couple of chairs outside and that is us set up but not so the Serious Traveller. They have complicated campers mounted on trailers with hydraulic lifting bits and endless, neatly organised plastic storage boxes in the back of the ute. The Serious Traveller always insists that their rig is incredibly quick and easy to set up but we sit with a glass of wine and watch them wherever we go and have yet to see any set up their camp in less than an hour, then they spend all evening going back and forth to the plastic boxes to get things before settling down for the night. The other bizarre thing we have noticed is they only ever seem to stay one night so the whole rigmarole is repeated in reverse as they pack up while we are having our breakfast.

 White Cliffs was a great stop. Some of the people live underground and we went to have a look at the famous underground hotel. It was fabulous, I don't know what I expected but the rooms were lovely and cool and somehow peaceful. I would recommend a flight up to Broken Hill, a drive to White Cliffs and a night or two in the underground hotel to anyone wanting to experience a different side of Australia to Sydney and the Barrier Reef. 

Opal mining towns seem to be a good place for people to go if they want to disappear, I am sure nobody would ask any questions if a new miner turned up and started working on a claim. Unlike in Lightning Ridge where the mining community were in evidence all the time usually having a jolly time in the pub, we didn't see many opal miners at all, even when we drove around the tourist route among all their little mines and homes, maybe they were meeting up underground somewhere. They did have a golf course though and, because it was just in the middle of the dirt, there was a little box positioned at the start containing information about the course and a little square of grass for driving the ball!