this week we're heading to the lightning ridge by foot
only 780 kilometres to go
What are you doing here? It's way too far to walk. Get in,
I suppose I should because I've got chafing on my chafing.
I'm Justin, and this is black opal direct. My family have been teaching and exploring opal since
1961. Click the subscribe button and enjoy as we dive into the best gem in the world, black opal.
the drive to lightning ridge anywhere from the east Australian coast is a long one, and
it has a great dividing range spanning from all the way down in victoria right into Queensland,
and it acts as a buffer from tropical weather to a dry arid climate after the ranges there's
nothing but flat farming land as far as a plane could fly way beyond lightning reach,
and after nine hours drive we finally made it to the best country town in Australia
there's a few things i need to explain to you about lightning ridge and when i go on a buying
trip i actually can't film it because um the opal miners or many of them don't want to be on film
so i can't take you in there and i can't share the experience with you which makes it tough to show
you what i go through to actually get the open and the only thing i can really do is explain it
to you so um every one of these houses has had open miners in them at one point or another or
there's retired miners and most people that live up here probably 95 percent of people live up here
actually work with opal mine opal cut opal sell opal so there's a lot of a lot of people in opal
here so knowing your way around lightning ridge is a really big part of being able to get enough
supply and uh i've been around long enough to get enough supply so i would love to share this holy
adventure but all i can do is tell you that i go into people's homes i go to people's minds and i
have a look at what they've got a type of opal and from there we negotiate a price and
then um they either accept the offer or they don't or i pay their price and then from there
i get to take the oklahoma and share it and cut it with you so that's all about all i can do without
human dog's going mental i must be uh just smell bad or something but anyway
um so yeah i would love to take you on that part but i just can't so you're gonna have to see the
rewards or whatever i end up getting to buy i'll show you straight up so let's have fun
i am actually heading up now to see one of the opel miners um they have told me that
they've got a fair bit of opal and um i would love to see uh what they got you're gonna have
to bear with me and i'll get back to you and to show you what i've got if i buy anything
if you are a tourist in lightning ridge, I guarantee
if you do come you will have so much fun there are so many sights to see
I just bought a really nice bag of rough. I'm so happy with that just bought a cool little jar of
nobbies. Oh, there's a one-piece in there. It's gonna be awesome not gonna believe it;
I just bought a nice piece of harlequin.
I'm so happy I just bought it; I think the reddest piece I've seen in a long time, so red
beautiful I scored another bag of rough they were out mining. They got some more;
yeah, a few weeks ago, I took you down and open cut mine and showed you their opal bearing level
and to meet a couple of wacky dudes getting stuck into finding their million bucks. Still,
I didn't mention that this area was not open to the public, and no fossicking can be done there.
It's totally fenced off. Still, you can go to the boys at Lunatic Hill at the top of
the open cut and fossick in their designated area. All mines are a no-go to the public.
With all of the loot I have, it's time to head back to the coast and get cutting. Don't worry,
you'll see it all up close. The next time I see you, it'll be back at the workshop.
wow what an adventure and a journey that was thanks for joining me well we're going
to just go through some of the stuff that i bought on the on the trip and give you an idea
and some of the stones we're going to be cutting over the next months so
i'd like to show you a little bit of what we got so come in and have a look this is a nice little
parcel of rubs with this absolutely red red color unbelievable color it really got my attention so
i couldn't pass it up because i don't see red like that very often here's another nice little
nice little stone just needs to be polished up properly it's only semi-polished so that will be
a nice black opal this one here also beautiful gem and uh has nice color going right across it
and that's around about the four four carrots five carrots finished i would say so not polished yet
here's a really black one nice red color going right across it but an n1 in body tone does
have a little bit of sand on the side which i'll roll up a little bit more you won't see it from
the top so if i roll up that back that would be pretty cool and these ones here a nice parcel of
of stones now i said that i got a harlequin but realistically this is not really harlequin it's
so close and if somebody else said i've got a harlequin i wouldn't really say no you don't
because it is close but it's more of a rigging a ribbon flagstone pattern and it has a
brother so we've got a double up here of two nice pattern stones and they could be they could easily
be a pair that's quite interesting and very pretty there's a couple of other nice stones in there
as well this one um had black on the top i gave it a quick rub just before and i went whoa that one
came up quite nice so that was really nice and another nice flagstone pattern gem and this
little guy which is still very very nice so all they need they still need to be polished which
i am very excited about and i will be polishing them over the coming days and so i also bought a
bottle of rough opal this is got some really nice i do believe that there's quite a few stones i
can cut out of this and there's one piece in here that i do think will be quite amazing
there you are it is, so this color bar here, I think, will probably cut a nice three to four
carat stone when I take that white off the top, so that should be good, and you know there are quite
a few other little gems that I can cut out of it you can see this one here has a nice little black
sitting there it's quite nice and um there's some nice blue gems in there as well you'll be able to
cut some nice blacks, and here we go that's another nice little gem so if you think about it,
all these are these opals they add up in value quite quickly even these tiny little
nuggets here like this one is still quite a nice it's going to be quite a nice stone
um it's got a nice color bar in it, and I'll just take that off the top
should be able to get a four or five hundred dollar stone out of it so pretty happy with
all of them, but I did get a mix of rubs rough and all sorts of bits and pieces and a cut stone and
a big bag, a nice big bag of rough I got here
with all sorts of stuff in that that I will be saving for, um our videos each week, so
I'll be picking out some nice stones to be able to cut with you guys because I really want to share
it with you but um I hope you enjoyed this video it wasn't too much about opal it was more about
the journey to Lightning Ridge and the processes I go through and the things that I do and the fun
we have, and I hope you enjoyed it, so next week we will be getting straight into cutting some of
this opal, and I hope you'll be there to share it with me thanks for watching see you next time
you