Days 14 and 15 Coober Pedy

2 and 3 June

Happy Birthday Kathy
                           Lilly
                           Me

Oh boy, this place is certainly different!!  When we drove in, I thought that I had arrived on the set of a Mad Max movie.

It is very hard adequately to convey the feeling of the town and the surrounding opal fields.  So
I am going to let the photos do the talking.

Before that, just a few words about the town and what we have been up to.

We were told yesterday, that about 3000 people live here and about 65% of them live in underground "dugouts".  Before you get the wrong impression, a "dugout" is more than just a hole in a hillside.  It is a full-size three or four bedroom house with all the facilities you would expect in a house built on the surface.  It costs about the same to dig out a dugout as it does to build a surface house.  People live in dugouts because they  maintain an even temperature all year round and because the summer flies, which exist in plague proportions on the surface, will not go underground.  It is worth noting that in winter it is quite cold, as we can attest, with maximum day time temperatures  not much more than the high 'teens.  In summer, on the other hand, the daytime temperature gets up to 45 or 50 degrees C and that's in the shade, if you can find any.  Out in the open you can add another 10 or 15 degrees to that.

It is not just homes that are dug out the hillsides, many businesses, including at least 2 motels and churches are also constructed the same way.  All you see of them is a facade that lets light into the living and wet areas and lots of ventilators and TV antennae poking up through the hill.

In the good old days people actually mined for opal in the town.  When this got too dangerous, mining was prohibited within the boundaries which, surprisingly, are quite extensive.  Of course, if you are digging out a new home or extending an old one and you come across some opal what are you going to do? Don't tell anyone!!  Not surprisingly quite a few homes have been or are being extended.

Yesterday, we went on a guided tour of the town and the closer opal fields.  This was an in-depth (no pun intended!) informative and thoroughly interesting explanation of what opal is, how it was formed, and the process of mining it.  The tour included a visit to an underground house and the mine that was dug out below it.

Today we had to do some housekeeping and some shopping.  There are two supermarkets in town and we were pleasantly surprised that we could buy all that we wanted, including fresh vegetables, at normal prices.  Fuel, on the other hand, is about 20 or 25 cents dearer per litre.

Seeing that it is my birthday, I decided to have a shower, regardless of whether I needed it or not.  It was quite an experience.  Water, and its supply, is very important in Coober Pedy.  It is drawn from the Great Artesian Basin and is quite salty and so it is put through a desalination process that makes it quite expensive.  This becomes apparent when you have a shower in the Caravan Park.  You have to buy it through a meter at the price of 20 cents (in 20 cent coins per two minutes.  Given that I had 3 coins with me and that the first twenty cents was used waiting for the water to warm up, I thought I did very well to have a proper shower and still have one coin over.

Anyhow, let's look at the photos.

This called a blower.  It a giant vacuum cleaner on the back of a truck.  It sucks up all the rubble that is gathered as a shaft is sunk and the tunnels are dug at the bottom of the shaft.  The rubble is dumped in the bucket and the dust blown into the air.  Hence the name.  Wherever you see a blower you know the claim is being worked.Given that a claim is either 50 x 50 or 100 x 100 metres it is small wonder that there hundreds of these blowers dotting the landscape.

The mining areas outside the town boundaries.  Each pile of spoil represents one shaft.  Each shaft is about 30 metres deep and for mining safety reasons, they are never filled in.  Hence the sign below.

Downtown Cooper Pedy

The town viewed from a lookout at the eastern end of the town

Believe it or not, there is an underground motel under this hill.

Not all houses are underground

A smaller underground house

A larger underground house.  The roof is there for rain collection  purposes

Note the pipes serving as vents for the rooms under the hill

The Serbian Orthodox underground church.  Once you go through the front door you are under the ground

This and the pictures below are good examples of what an underground house looks like on the inside

Inside an opal mine.  This mine was started in the 1920's

These tunnels were dug by hand and the spoil removed by hand and hand cranked windlass.

This tunnel was dug by a circular tunneller.  They are no longer used.  instead, modern tunnellers dig a rectangular tunnel  in which a man can stand upright

This where the opal is actually found in a seam that is usually only a few centimetres thick

This opal is called "potch" and does not have any value

This is the real deal.  Even in this day of mechanised mining,  the opal is actually dug out by hand,  sometimes delicately by screwdriver

Opal miners are not keen to sell their opals to wholesalers.  They would rather sell them directly.  So not surprisingly, even second shop seems to be an opal outlet.  This is one of them, just across from the IGA Supermarket.

Coober Pedy is full of characters.  This is the grave of one of them.

It never pays to judge a book by its cover in this town.  This unprepossessing bakery in the main street opposite the Umoona Opal Mine and Museum served an excellent cup of coffee and the best vanilla slices Bev ever tasted.

Just before I go, Coober Pedy is an english corruption of an aboriginal name which means, white man's burrow!

Tomorrow we are off to Erldunda 480 kms up the track so we will be saying goodbye to Coober Pedy.  I am glad that we stayed here for 2.5 days.  You need at least that long to do it justice.