Down Under and Underground in Coober Pedy, SA: Aug 26 - 27

We slept underground! Most people in Coober Pedy sleep underground to escape the glaring heat of the desert without needing air conditioning. Interestingly, they also don’t need heating during the subzero winters. We stayed at a hotel owned by a couple who also run an opal mine…and who live underground themselves. The whole town exists solely for the opal mining - something like 80% of the world’s opal comes from there. Who knew?

Along with the underground room, which was carved out of sandstone and was perfectly clean and comfortable, we got a fascinating tour of a retired opal mine "next door" to the hotel (really the same chunk of hollowed-out rock). The owner explained to us how opals are made and how to find it. They're basically silica and water trapped together and compressed for many, many years. The pressure compressing them must stay the same for the quality of the opal to be considered a precious gem, otherwise it is what is called "potch," which is economically worthless and makes up 95% of what is found. There also seems to be no real way to know what you'll find in any vein, or where to find it. Consequently, all the mines are run by individuals or small partnerships, rather than by mining corporations. This has also kept Coober Pedy a very small town in the middle of nowhere, and perfectly unique. Divining rods are used to help find veins, and we were instructed on this, and it actually seemed to work! But was it all in our heads...was it only because he told us where we should have a reaction? Does anyone out there know whether there is any truth to this or how it might work? His best theory is that, since humans give off energy and so does water, it is basically a reaction between the two energies...or something like that. I'm not so sure...the ground also slanted downward right where the vein was and where our rods were supposed to droop (hee hee), so maybe it was simple gravity. But then they rose back up after we passed the area too, so who knows.

Anyway, while we were in Coober Pedy, we went out for some really fantastic pizza! We went to this particular place because it was known for its "native" pizza options. We got an emu sausage pizza and a smoked Kangaroo pizza. They were so incredibly good! Really better than any pizza I had while living in NYC. The emu sausage one was my favorite - the sausage was basically like a slightly sweeter pepperoni, and it came with some sort of feta-like cheese, beets, kalamata olives, and other veggies - yum. I think it was the beets and cheese that really made the dish, but I loved it. The kangaroo was meltingly soft, but if you told me it was beef, I wouldn't have questioned it.

After filling ourselves and looking at some of the opal shops in town, we headed out. At this point, we had gone a few hundred kilometers from the southern coast and were in seriously empty desert - no scrub brush, no nothing. the area looked like the environment of Total Recall, and is actually the filming location of Mad Max and Pitch Black if you have ever seen either of those. There are a few sites we went to see before leaving the area, which required a little "corrugated road" driving - yikes. These roads are so bumpy that you can hydroplane without the hydro! We were going super slow, but the slower you go, the worse it feels on the car, so you try to find a happy balance between bump-planing and not to slow. Kinda fun, but I'm glad it was only for a short distance. The first place we visited was called Moon Plain because of its resemblance of the moon. It is covered with some sort of sparkly charcoal black rock and is really spooky.

Just beyond that was an area called The Breakaways, wheresandstone hills that have eroded more slowly than the surrounding desert rise up in a rainbow of colors ranging from white to red to black. All this in the middle of flat, beige-colored nothingness - really cool.

Also in the area was Dog Fence, which is longer than the Great Wall of China, but nowhere near as impressive. It's just a wire fence. But it is interesting because it is so long and was intended to keep the dingoes out of agricultural southern Australia.

The sand around here had turned the rust red color you think of for the Aussie Outback, but what made it even more interesting was some sort of black stone that made large swaths of area look burned. We actually got out of the car to try and figure it out.

Oh, and there were also huge salt pans - I have to do some research because I have no idea how they've formed. But they're essentially dried up lakes that have left a crusty white layer of salt on their exceedingly flat surfaces. We walked out on one and it was so surreal - like we were sweating while standing on an icy lake.

 

 Perhaps it serves as a salt lick to wild animals...

That night, we made it from Coober Pedy to Erldunda at the turn off for King's Canyon and Uluru (Ayer's Rock).