25th - 27th May

Today we made it to Coober Pedy.  We have been keen to see this town but even though we have seen film on TV about it we were not prepared for what we found here.  This really is a very strange place.

For a lot of SA we have not seen a lot of lawn or even grass and this town is no exception.  The ground is bare dirt but as we start to come near to the town we are greeted with hundreds of small piles of dirt much like mole hills.  Occasionally a strange truck stands nearby and often there is old broken down machinery or car bodies.  This is the mining area of Coober Pedy.

 We booked into the caravan park and again no grass. We were also greeted with having to purchase the water we used, - $1 purchases 40 litres and showers are $0.20 for four minutes.  This is the norm for this town we find out.  The water is bore water and is in fact the fifth best quality water in Australia but it is expensive and in limited supply.

A walk down the main street was very interesting.  Many Indigenous people were sitting around with a real appearance of hopelessness.  Every second store sold Opals but few were doing much business.  Many of the properties were surrounded by barbed wire topped fences.  Some buildings were above ground while many were underground with above ground store front.  The main 4 star hotel was partly underground too. 

A 4 star hotel partly underground

Main street - Coober Pedy

 For us the interesting part was the people.  While the travellers were extremely friendly wherever we went the locals would more often than not turn the other way as we passed.  When we greeted the Aboriginal people they for the most part looked blankly through us as if no one ever spoke to them.  There appeared to be oppression over the town.

The positive side however was experiencing the underground buildings, learning something about the mining process and history as well as visiting an amazing geological feature called the Breakaways.

We visited a mining display and were able to walk through an actual mine that had been turned into a display area.  There we were able to walk / crawl through an underground mine, see models of how the mine was operated, understand how miners lived underground in their actual mine site, and experience the climate and environment that they did without the physical exertion.  Above ground an actual miner took us through the steps of actual gem field mining and demonstrated some of the equipment used (or even made by the miners).  For Ian with his quarrying background this was very interesting but also scary as safety was not always taken seriously.  The strange trucks we had seen on the way into town were actually vacuum pumps that sucked the material being dug from the mine floor to the surface and created the little mole hills we had also seen.  We also saw the ingenuity of people with little money able to build unique equipment from old car parts and junk.  How they built their homes with all the comforts and bypassed all the building requirements that we face today.  And it was all in the goal of gaining riches.

This machine sucks up the spoil from the mining below ground and piles it above ground.

Familiar miner in action - The museum sign is not pointing at Alice.



A seam of opal in an underground face



Living underground

About 23 klms north of the town is a very special mountain feature called the Breakaways.  The name was given because many people had thought that the range had actually broken away from the Stuart Ranges.  In fact the row of hills has been formed by a build up of sedimentary materials capped with a silica crust.  Over millions of years these have eroded and the silica can be seen across many of the escarpment faces.  It really is quite unique.

An area of Breakaways where silica has broken out of the face

On the road back we passed the Dingo Fence.  This fence has been built across many hundreds of klms to stop dingoes from moving south into the grazing areas.  Ian was surprised that the fence was not much more than a metre high and still was effective.

This fence keeps dingoes from moving south into grazing country for 1000s of klms

Then back to town where its moonscape appearance was evident well before reaching the outskirts of the town.  We had planned to stay from three nights but called it short and decided to move on after two.  But just to leave a lasting impression the town had a total black out half way through Ian’s ($0.20) shower.  What do you do when you are all soaped up with nowhere to go?  What a sticky end to a strange two days.