The holiest place in Australia.........

Coober Pedy

Kulgera bus stop

Coober Pedy (CP) is the holiest place in Australia and I’m not talking religion, although I’m sure more than a few of the miners pray to their god(s)everyday to keep them safe and bring them the luck that is needed to find the holy grail of gems……..Opal. Australia produces the majority (~97%) of the world’s opals and “The Opal Capital of the World” is Coober Pedy; more than 75% of the world’s commercial opal is mined here.  Coober Pedy sits in the middle of nowhere, about halfway (~700Km) between Alice Springs and Adelaide; not even the train stops here. If you take The Ghan and want to get off for Coober Pedy, the train will stop sometime around midnight at the “Manguri Station”, nothing more than a train signal about ~50Km from CP; you have to arrange for someone to pick you up beforehand and hope they will be there when you get off the train. I took the bus from Alice so that I could view more of that beautiful Australian outback and have assurance I would be dropped off in town. The bus made a few interesting stops along the way, and the countryside as seen from the bus is the same as from the train; flat, desert, scrubland for miles in every direction, but then as you approach Coober Pedy, you begin to see white teepees of soil looking like albino termite mounds on both sides of the road; as you get closer, there are more and more mounds until suddenly...... Unfortunately it was getting dark by the time I arrived so I would have to wait until morning to get a better picture of the surroundings.

Fred Flinstone never had it so good

Underground Motel

Hopping off the bus, I slung my pack over my back and hiked through town to my accommodation for the next few days , “The Underground Motel”. The name is accurate for the lodging is underground, more accurately the rooms are built into the hillside like hobbit homes; one room caves with electricity, running water and very cozy. No AC or heat is necessary; the rooms stay comfortable (~74F) year  round, even when the temperature outside reaches over 120F in the shade during summer. There are buildings above ground, but the majority live and work underground. Exactly how many people live in Coober Pedy is not certain, somewhere between 3000-5000; no one knows for sure.  I heard the comment made many times that if you want to hide out, Coober Pedy is the place to do it; people don’t ask too many questions around here. The town is quite international too, there are over 45 nationalities represented in the small population.  Mike, the motel owner, filled me in on what to see and do and asked me if I wanted a ride back into town for dinner. When he found out I was from Chicago he said he would introduce me to another guy who came from Chicago and owned “John’s Pizza Bar and Restaurant”.  So off we went with Mike to meet Nick, who is Greek, lived in Chicago during his teenage years, came to Coober Pedy when he was in his early twenties and hasn’t left after 30 years. The menu was extensive but of course I ordered a pizza….. an Emu pizza. I had been watching the staff pulling pizzas from the oven; they looked great and tasted even better; the crust

Passing a "road train"

which really makes a pizza, was perfect. As I sat eating, Nick came over and we started talking. When he found out I was taking the bus back to Adelaide he said NO! and told me to cancel my reservation. He was driving to Adelaide the same day and he said I could ride with him. Sure thing, two days later I’m in the car with Nick, the Greek, ex-Chicagoan, opal mining, , Coober Pedian restauranteur, driving nine hours through the deslolate Australian desert from Coober Pedy to Adelaide. That’s what you do on an odyssey. Along the way I got a chance to see some emus, road trains (trucks 3 semi’s long) and learn more about opal mining than I ever thought I would. For about $600 you can get a permit, stake your claim, dig a hole and take a chance at striking it rich; unfortunately as I also learned, that last part doesn’t happen too often.

There is an open mine shaft next to each mound.

It's called a blower but it really sucks.

Cooper Pedy comes from the Aboriginal "kupa-piti" meaning "white man in a hole". When researching my trip I read that there are over 250,000 holes in Coober Pedy and on the town tour our guide “Jimmy”; who was also Greek and whose real name isn’t Jimmy, said there are over 400,000. Now I don’t know which figure is accurate but there are a lot of holes; and next to each hole is a conical mound of dirt, bleached white by the desert sun. The cones are formed when the dirt from the mine shaft is removed and dumped by the “blower”. The blower is a piece of mining equipment invented in Cooper Pedy specifically for opal mining. It is basically a giant, truck mounted, vacuum cleaner that sucks the dirt out of the hole into a big garbage can like bucket with a hinged bottom that allows the dirt to fall out once filled. I went to a demonstration at the “Old Timers Mine” Museum and that thing sucks (not the museum, the blower).  They let you hold up rocks and have it suck them out of your hand. The museum was very interesting showing how the old timers dug the mines with picks and shovels and removed the dirt with cowhide buckets raised and lowered on a windlass; and contained a great deal of Coober Pedy history. The museum also highlighted the fickleness of opal mining. The original mine, hand dug in 1916, was well worked, with some of the tunnels backfilled by dirt from new tunnels. When they were cleaning out the tunnels to create the museum they also expanded the entrance and found a seam of opal worth tens of thousands the original miners missed by a mere 10 centimeters. Opal mining is not like gold or

Watch your step

diamond mining where you have whole lot of it concentrated in a small area. Opals are more like hermits of the precious stone world. You might have one here and the next one could be right next door or hundreds of feet away, hence all the holes. It’s like finding a needle in a haystack and the area around Coober Pedy is one big haystack. There are no large opal mining operations in Coober Pedy; all the mines are individually owned 100m x 50m plots. Once you get your permit, you just walk out into the mine field and place your four stakes into the ground forming a rectangle. As long as no one has staked out the area, the plot is yours.  You dig a hole and hopefully find some opals. If not you can dig more holes on your plot or pick up your stakes and move to a new plot and start again. It’s as simple as that. Sometimes you find opals almost accidently. There were two women who were digging the first room of their home and found opals. They dug a second room and found opals again, so they dug a third room and you guessed it, they found opals; they now have a 21 room home. Sometimes it works out that way.

Sederbian Church

Coober Pedy is holy too, I visited the Catholic church, the Catacomb church and the Serbian church; all underground. Boot Hill cemetery was interesting; reading the names on the headstones you got a real feel for number the nationalities living in Coober Pedy and some of their sense of humor. One guy’s tombstone was screwed into the

One for the road

ground; apparently he yapped so much when he was alive they wanted to be sure he didn’t come back and talk their ear off after he died. Another guy has a beer keg for a headstone; allegedly it was full of beer and in working order when they buried him.

The golf course - FORE!

One of the "greens"

Then there is the golf course; no grass, in fact it's against the rules to step on grass,  they give you a piece of Astroturf to carry around and hit off of; they use colored balls during the day, the white ones are hard to locate amongst all the rocks in the glaring sun; they play a lot of night golf with lighted balls because it’s too hot to play during the day; and the greens are actually black from the oil used to create them and keep the dust down, you also have to rake the greens. 
 The golf club gave an opal mine to St. Andrews in Scotland and in return received reciprocal playing rights (okay so it’s only at the Balgove Course and not the Links, but still); the letter of thanks from St. Andrews is posted in the Old Timers Museum and is pretty funny.   

The Breakaways, an ancient seafloor, and one lucky bloke!

The town tour also included a trip out to “The Breakaways”, a string of hills that "broke away" from the Flinders range millions of years ago and now overlooks the bottom of what once was a vast inland ocean. Jimmy discovered fossils of sea creatures that are now on display in various Australian museums; and fossils can still be found, although now it is illegal to hunt for and remove them.  

The Sleeping Camel - part of the Breakaways

From the top of The Breakaways we drove down to the desert ocean floor and on to the “Moon Plain”. The Moon Plain is so named because usually there is nothing there but a flat, barren, harsh, sun-bleached rocky plain that resembles the moon. The site has been used in a few movies as the surface of another planet; most notably “Pitch Black” starring Vin Diesel. Unfortunately with all the rain even the Moon Plain has plants growing on it so it no longer looks like its moniker. I would have preferred seeing it as the

The moon if it had shrubbery

as the desolate Moon Plain, but I did have the chance to see it in a rare vegitive state. From the Moon Plain we moved on to the “Dog Fence”, the longest fence in the world. It stretches over 5200Km and is designed to keep the wild dogs and dingoes in northern cattle country from invading southern sheep country.  Towns along the way have responsibility for monitoring and maintaining sections of the fence; Coober Pedy is accountable for ~350Km. Kangaroos can jump the fence, but it is the some 1 million feral camels that do the most damage when the big creatures walk through the fence.

The Dog Fence - used to keep mongrel dogs out

Again because of all the rain I had the chance to view another once in a lifetime occurrence, a full Lake Eyre. Avast inland salt lake, the Lake Eyre Basin covers about 1/6 of Australia. During the rainy

"Yes I do know how to fly the palne and stop taking my picture"

Flying out over Lake Eyre

season most of the runoff from ariund Australia drains into northern Lake Eyre. Southern Lake Eyre is usually  a dry salt flat similar to our Bonneville Salt Flats. Land speed records have been set on the Lake Eyre salt flat. It is rare that the lake  spills over from the north into the south and fills completely; this has happened only three times in the last 150 years. It wasn’t on my original agenda but I couldn’t pass on the opportunity so after Mike gave me a ride to the Coober Pedy airport, I boarded a small 6 seat propeller plane for the 2  hour flight out to Lake Eyre. Lucky me, I got to sit in the co-pilot seat. We took off and headed East into the sun. The plane was noisy and you had to wear a microphone headset to protect your ears and be heard. Going out we flew at ~1500 feet. It was awesome. From the air you get a very good view of all the holes dotting the land around Coober Pedy and staying low you could really see the changing landscape. We started with the basic desert scrubland, crossed

William Creek Station

The Painted Hills

barely 500 feet above a small set of hills, and moved on to a landscape of vegetation covered sand dunes that litterally looked like waves rolling across the land below. The color palette changed from a green background with brown patches, to  brown background with green patches, and when we later flew towards the PaInted Hills, a red background with green and brown patches. You could also see the green snakes of vegetation following the now dry riverbeds and the arrow straight, rusty-orange, unsealed roads reaching out to infinity. In the distance we saw this huge blue body of water glimmering in the brilliant sun. Lake Eyre is big but our pilot guide Peter said that the average depth is just 10 centimeters with the deepest part only 1 meter and it is 2.5 times saltier than the Dead Sea. We flew low, ~1000 feet, as we did a couple turns around the southern edge of the lake, and the lowest spot in Australia, before landing for a break at William Creek Station; population less than 10. They just paved their runway a few years ago and there is a hotel and a bar (of course). Every place we stopped in the outback, no
matter how remote, has a bar. Back in the air we headed for the Painted Hills; ancient sandstone mountaintops slowly eroding over eons into colorful works of art. Their color makes them look like the aftermath of an open pit mining
operation, but the colors are all natural. The hills lie on the property of Anna Creek Station which severely restricts access. Pete said not even Anna Creek employees can visit the hills and the only way to view them is from the air.  We headed

That's a lot of holes

back over the opal fields and the open holes to Coober Pedy. I noted as we landed that the airport is surrounded by opal mines and actually sits atop the opal minefield. I’m surprised no one has yet dug a hole into the runway. My guess is there are probably some tunnels from nearby mines running under the airport.

Crash landed

There are many other quirky things and characters in Coober Pedy. The first tree “planted” is made of welded iron beams; old movie props abound; the Italian family who despite the cost of water has a garden with flowers, a lemon tree and a fountain; and “Crocodile Harry”. Crocodile Harry was a crocodile hunter from the Northern territory who once killed 89 crocs in one day and is most likely the inspiration for the movie “Crocodile Dundee”.

Inside "Crocodile Harry's" Home

 When crocodile hunting became illegal, he moved to Coober Pedy and mined opals. Harry died a few years back but you can visit his underground “home”; a series of caves, filled with indescribable paraphernalia, that was used in the movie "Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome". He was quite a character; you’ll have to look him up on the internet to learn more.

They say if you stay in Coober Pedy more than two days you will stay forever. There is some truth to aphorism; something seductive pulls at your soul. I asked Mike about it, he said it's the freedom; I think the people have a lot to do with it as well. One more day and I would become one of the mole people, carving a dugout and never leaving; it's that alluring. I'd love to come back to Coober Pedy someday, so if everyone wants to chip in a fews bucks, I'll travel the thousands of miles, cross the dry desert sands, to come to a place in the middle of nowhere, live underground, dig a few holes, and maybe, just maybe find us a fortune in opals.

This could be ours

Literally from down under.

norb