The Mekong Delta

From Phnom Penh the budget traveler has two options to get into Vietnam - either taking a bus directly to Ho Chi Minh city, or a boat along the Mekong River to Chau Doc. Since we wanted to spend some time in the Mekong Delta we went for the boat option - we were told that slow boats were not running because the water level was too low, but the river seemed deep enough to us. More likely the slow boat option has been eliminated because the supposedly fast boat makes a bigger turnaround, though calling it "fast" is a bit of a misnomer - it took from 8am till 6pm to get to Chau Doc, just an hour less than if we had taken the slow boat!

The cruise along the Mekong is as picturesque as you would imagine - small fishermen's canoes, floating houses, and groups of kids waving from the banks, but seeing riverbanks and fishing boats for 5 hours tends to get a bit boring. We were afforded a nice little break from the monotony in the form of a Vietnamese customs check - or lack thereof! Our fixer took our passports and ushered us off the boat and onto the customs barge, where we were told to wait in a cafeteria / lounge. After some 20 minutes he returned with all our passports stamped, and we were in! We never even looked at a customs official, no sniffer dogs, nothing - somewhat surprising considering we were entering the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, but I guess it was also nice not to have our luggage eviscerated, or to be faced with the usual questions about what sort of country Malta is, if it even is an independent state etc.

Chau Doc

Eventually the boat made its way to Chau Doc and we were loaded onto a couple of Xyclos (like a tuktuk, but pulled by a bicycle) and taken to our chosen hotel, but only after the drivers attempted to drop us off at another guesthouse (presumably one that would have paid them commission). Out on the streets of Chau Doc we found a nice little hole-in-the-wall place that served an old Vietnamese favorite - Pho Bo, or beef noodle soup. This is a staple snack that is usually eaten at breakfast, but for us westerners it makes a nice meal at any time of the day, and at about $1 a bowl you can't argue with the price! With just three weeks to explore Vietnam our sightseeing in Chau Doc was limited to a visit to Sam Mountain. This large hill is the only break in the horizon for miles around and is home to dozens of pagodas and buddhist temples. After our experience in Cambodia, the Vietnamese pagodas were a bit of a shock. Not so much a place to find your Zen, they were more like a combination of market, kitsch factory and rock concert! Huge crowds were thronging through the Pagodas burning incense, chanting prayers, selling souvenirs, taking photos… One Pagoda that we visited even had a Communist Party meeting going in the forecourt!

The highlight of our visit was the decidedly more sedate cave Pagoda. The atmosphere here was much closer to the serenity and tranquility found in the temples of Cambodia. There were no thronging crowds, just a handful of worshippers, and we actually saw some Buddhist monks walking around getting ready for lunch. We still had to make our way through a path lined with hawkers to get to the temple, but they were much less pushy than the ones at the foot of the mountain.

Can Tho

In the afternoon we took a two hour mini-van from Chau Doc to Can Tho, one of the larger towns in the Mekong Delta. Once we'd dropped off our bags at the guest house we hit the streets to look for some dinner. As we stepped out of the hotel we were greeted by Paul, an American tourist who had been exploring the southern most part of Vietnam for a few weeks and hadn't seen any westerners since! We headed off together in search of what the Lonely Planet guidebook terms "restaurant alley", though when we eventually found the place it didn't have that many eateries along it! We settled on some more Pho for dinner and a few pastries from a baker's for dessert, and after that we turned in to get some sleep, as we would be getting up at 5am the following day for a trip to Cai Rang floating market.

Cai Rang is the biggest floating market in the Mekong Delta, and is quite close to Can Tho. We met up with Paul outside his guest house at 5:30am and made our way to the docks to find our boat and driver. The skipper spoke hardly any English, but he did understand the words beer and cigarettes. The going was quite slow, it took us about an hour to cover the 6km stretch of water to Cai Rang, but when we did eventually arrive we found a bustling confusion of boats awaiting us. Cai Rang is more of a wholesale market rather than one where villagers go to do their shopping, but it was interesting none the less. The sellers advertise their produce by hanging samples onto a bamboo flagpole on the stern of the boat. Some specialized in one particular product, for example Dragon Fruit, whereas others had a whole range of vegetables for sale. Mingling among these bigger boats were ones closer in size to our humble transport, floating kitchens and bars that kept the shoppers and retailers watered and fed. The growing number of tourists visiting the market also influences the presence of these vendors.

Once we'd done a circuit of the market we had a two hour boat ride back to Can Tho to look forward to, taking us through narrow canals and back lanes. There were plenty of distractions along the way in the form of floating or semi-floating houses, and kids playing in the warm (and dirty) waters of the canal.

You can see photos of Chau Doc and Can Tho on my picasa web albums

We made our way back into Can Tho at about 9:30am, and seeing as it was still early in the day we decided to take a midmorning nap before catching a bus to Vietnam's largest city - Ho Chi Minh, or Saigon as you and I will call it!

Time flies when you're doing nothing!

The most famous seaside town in Cambodia has to be Sihanoukville, named after the Cambodian King and home to some wonderful white beaches and a relaxed vibe. This place is a cure all for the ills travelers suffer on the Cambodian roads, the bruises racked up while raiding tombs in Siem Reap and for the mind numbing brutality that is exhibited in Tuol Sleung and Cheung Ek.

We based ourselves in Serendipity Beach, a still developing part of town: the road leading to the beach is a mess, and much of it is lined by construction sites. The plus side to such a situation is that prices are still relatively low ($7 for a double room with fan and TV) and very close to the beach - we literally could roll out of bed and find ourselves on white sand! There isn't much to do in Sihanoukville besides laze on the beach, and that is exactly what we did for most of our stay. The beers are incredibly cheap (50c for a pint) and in the evenings the beachfront huts all offer a great sea food barbecue for just $3.

Our week at this beach side haven consisted of waking up late, walking to town for a light lunch, then hitting the beach for a swim in the warm tropical waters. This was followed by an afternoon of lazing in the sun, and not much else!

We diverted from our daily routine of sun-worshipping just once when we took a trip out to Ream National Park. Ream is one of the more recent national parks in Cambodia, having been established in 1993. It is home to a variety of animals, including sun bears, elephants, monkeys and tigers, as well as large numbers of birds. The river is also home to the rare Irawaddy dolphins; but on out trip all we saw were birds, and they provided quite a show. We saw three eagles catch an unweary sparrow in mid air, as well as several storks digging for mollusks in the mud. The most abundant wildlife we came across while riding down the river were locals - either fishing with nets or wading in the water for estuarine oysters.

That's pretty much it for Cambodia - we rode out the last few days till our Vietnamese visa became valid soaking up the sun in Sihanouk, before proceeding to Phnom Penh for one last night before taking a boat down the Mekong into Vietnam. Our visit to Cambodia allowed us to see the highlights of this rich and varied country, and if time weren't a limiting factor we would certainly have explored further, going off the beaten track to meet more of the friendly locals and see what the countryside has to offer… maybe next time!

Phnom Penh - Pearl of Asia

Oh, Phnom Penh! Where do I begin!?! Might as well start from the beginning, with a warning to would be travelers in this part of the world: treat bus time tables as mere approximations! Our bus from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh was meant to depart at 8:30am, and that's when the courtesy bus came to pick us up from our guest house. On the courtesy bus with us were a couple of people from another guest house who were booked for a bus departing at 9am. After doing a circuit of Siem Reap, we went back to these people's guest house to pick up another couple of travelers who were booked on a bus leaving at 9:30! When we finally got to the bus station (9:25) we were shuffled onto the same bus, which eventually departed at about 9:45.

Once on the road, we quickly came to realize what the Lonely Planet guide books mean when they say that Asians rely on the horn as a method of defensive driving. A more appropriate description would be to say that drivers have a certain quota of horn use per minute that must be adhered to - I would say that it stands around 25 honks per minute. If there's a bike on the road, you honk so it gets out of the way. If there's a car coming the other way, you honk so it doesn't suddenly swerve into your lane. If the road is empty, you honk anyway, just in case there's a bike hidden in the trees just waiting to swerve out in front of you! Added to the incessant hooting of horns is the unnaturally loud Cambodian pop music, complete with lyrics for would be karaoke stars. Fortunately for everyone's eardrums it seems that Khmers don't aspire to karaoke stardom, as no-one was singing along to the music!

After about five hours of the best that Cambodian roads could throw at us we pulled up into Phnom Penh's night market area,

where we were instantly swimming in a sea of túk-túk and moto drivers offering to take us to great guest houses, or to the killing fields. An offer of a ride to the killing fields would become the running theme of our stay in Phnom Penh - its the most lucrative ride a driver can offer you, as it is the only 'attraction' that lies outside of town, so naturally its the one they're trying to sell. Once we'd settled into OK guesthouse (an OK place) we took to the streets to explore some markets where we got a bit of fresh fruit (rambattan, mago and lychee) and street food, though our plan for a cheap eat backfired, as we neglected to negotiate a price in advance for our food… not that we ended up paying an extortionate amount for our meal, but for the same money we could have had a sit down meal at the guest house. There are two sorts of market in Phnom Penh: those for locals and those for foreigners. In the former you'll find anything and everything: dried fish, herbs and spices, motorbike spares, clothing, barbers, tailors, beauty therapists etc etc, whereas tourist oriented markets tend to stick to textiles and souvenirs. Needless to say the local markets are much more interesting for a wandering photographer, though the smell of raw fish can be a bit daunting at first!

On our first sightseeing trip in Phnom Penh we walked to the National Museum. There isn't much to see here, and the information boards struggle to live up to their name, but one hopes that the rather pricey $3 entry fee will go towards improving the museum. An interesting exhibit displays the remains of a giant bronze statue of Shiva, said to have stood around 7m tall. This was discovered in a rice field in the 80s thanks to a paddy farmer who decided he should inform the French researchers about what lay buried in his field. Much of the museum is dedicated to exhibiting Angkor-era artifacts and carvings, but rather than displaying artifacts originating in Angkor Wat the museum strives to display pieces from all-over the country, thus showing the viewer that its not just Siem Reap that is home to fabulous temples. An ingenious ploy for expanding tourism to the rest of the country, if only the Cambodian authorities worked a bit harder on it! When its not dealing with the magnificent temples that dot the country the museum presents some relics from the Royal Palace next door.

Our visit to the National Museum left me thinking that the entry fee was inflated, but I was proved wrong when we visited the Royal Palace and Silver Pagoda, where foreigners are expected to pay a whopping $6 to catch a glimpse of his royal highness's function room! As with many Cambodian attractions information is almost inexistent at the Royal Palace, and even the Lonely Planet guidebook doesn't say much about the place. The Royal Function room is all you'd expect from a room where the king throws his parties - plenty of gold leaf decor on intricately carved woodwork and lots of larger than life portraits of the top dude and his family.

The Silver Pagoda, so called because of its floor made of some 5000 silver tiles, is home to a Baccarat crystal Buddha that sits at the top of a platform in the middle of the room. Rivaling this emerald beauty is a life-size, 90kg solid gold Buddha encrusted with more than 2000 diamonds. Keeping these two precious deities company are hundreds, if not thousands, of other statues of Buddha, ranging in size from a few feet tall to ones that could fit on the tip of a finger, and all made of various precious and semiprecious metals.

After a near-overdose of Buddha statues we took a short stroll around the perimeter wall that depicts scenes from the literary epic the Ramayana, after which we visited some exhibition rooms housing various royal howdahs (elephant saddles) and a model of the royal cortege for the reinstatement of the King following the turbulent years of civil war.

During the years of the Democratic Republic of Kampuchea, 1975-79, the years when the Khmer Rouge took control of the country, Cambodia underwent a massive, horrible humanitarian disaster. Thousands fled from the violence in the countryside into Phnom Penh, where they thought they would be safe from the Khmer Rouge, but this changed when in April 1975 the Red Khmers marched into the city. In their quest to establish an agrarian society they forcefully transferred city dwellers to the countryside, but not before imprisoning anyone they deemed an intellectual. By intellectual they meant - anyone who spoke a foreign language, anyone with education beyond secondary school, people wearing glasses, land owners, teachers… the list goes on and on. The detainees were housed in what once was a secondary school, but later came to be known as Tuol Sleung S21 (S for Security Prison, 2 for the district, and 1 for Pol Pot, brother number 1). A visit to Tuol Sleung will make for a gloomy day, but it is disrespectful to the Cambodians to visit their country and not learn about the atrocities they suffered at the hands of their own brothers. The school boundary wall was redoubled with a corrugated iron fence topped with barbed wire; several classrooms were subdivided into dozens of cells no more than 80cm wide and 180cm long. Others had dividing walls torn down to create mass detention rooms, where twenty prisoners would lie next to each other shackled to the same metal rod. High ranking prisoners were "lucky" enough to get their own cell, but the only furniture they got was a metal bed. The balconies of the school buildings were fenced in with barbed wire - not to prevent prisoners escaping, but to stop them from jumping to their deaths, thus escaping the system. Not that many of the prisoners would end up anything but dead - at the height of its activity S21 was claiming as many as 100 deaths a day, and of the estimated 9000 people to go through Tuol Sleung only 7 survived by the time of the liberation in 1979.

Those who made it through processing at Tuol Sleung invariably ended up at the Killing Fields of Cheung Ek, a site with as many as 129 mass graves where they were blindfolded and murdered at the edge of mass graves. Some 17,000 bodies have been recovered, but without further digging it is hard to tell if there are more mass graves hidden in the area. The remains uncovered around Cheung Ek reveal that it wasn't only prisoners of S-21 that breathed their last in the area - one mass grave was found to contain over 160 headless corpses dressed in military uniforms, whereas a particularly knobbly tree bears the chilling notice "Tree used for beating children". It seems that in an effort to save on bullets the executioners would beat children to death against the tree, whereas adult prisoners would be bludgeoned to death with farm implements of have their throats slit.

The memorial at the Killing Fields of Cheung Ek serves a dual purpose - not only does act as a memorial for the thousands that perished here, but it bears witness to how low human beings can sink in their evil.

After the sobering day spent discovering the dark side of Cambodian history we felt that we needed some time to recover our senses, and so it was that we booked ourselves on an early bus to Sihanoukville, a beachside town overlooking the Gulf of Thailand.

For photos from Phnom Penh, visit my Picasa albums!

Tomb Raiding in Siem Reap

Due to the dramatic turn of events in Thailand our plans for an island introduction to South East Asia had to be scrapped - with barely a week to make arrangements, we opted to start our adventure in Cambodia, the only mainland S.E. Asian country that has e-visa facilities. Modern Cambodia has only been open to travelers since 1993, when the bitter civil war between the Khmer Rouge and government forces came to an end, and though the tourism facilities are lagging behind those in neighboring countries, Cambodia is swiftly catching up.

Our first port of call in Cambodia was the north eastern city of Siem Reap, home of the World Heritage listed temples of Angkor. You've probably seen the temples in the first Tomb Raider movie, but it is only one temple that is in the run down state that Lara Croft invades. The temples were "discovered" by French explorers in the late 19th Century, and since then there has been on-off restoration work. Much of the earlier restorations did more harm than good though - the clearing of forest certainly had a positive effect, but repairs using modern materials actually made water seepage worse. To make matters worse, restoration work had to be abandoned in 1975 with the Khmer Rouge insurrection, and did not resume in earnest until the 1990s. Nowadays the restoration work is funded by various international governments, and the focus is on returning the temples to their original state and reversing harmful restorations from the past. An interesting point about the restorations is the old to new ratio - buildings will only be rebuilt if for every new brick used two old ones can be fitted in. This is done to maintain the original building materials. If the quantity of new material is too high the original blocks are put in storage or displayed in situ.

This new approach to restoration has certainly breathed a new lease of life for the temples, but it results in a somewhat unsightly mixture of building materials. Perhaps the effect will lessen somewhat with time when the newer materials are weathered by the effects of time. In any case, the temples provide a unique experience and an impressive site for the eyes…

The temples of Angkor constitute the largest religious building in the world, and the whole complex is spread over an area of many kilometers. Our preferred mode of transport was with the ubiquitous south east Asian Tuk-Tuk or moto rickshaw. For an average of $11 a day our driver took us to visit the various temples over three days.

Our first stop was at the mighty Ankor Wat, the largest and most impressive of the temples. It is surrounded by a mighty moat that makes European moats look like children's paddle pools. The complex is approached from a wide walkway to the east, but when we visited the morning sun was obscured by clouds, somewhat diminishing the majesty of the temple, but not altogether extinguishing its might. We were given two hours to explore, and that wasn't nearly enough! There's just so much ground to cover, so many carvings to admire, that we found ourselves pressed for time. The complex rises in tiers, and when you get to the central, highest level, you are faced with a steep, near vertical staircase that comes with a warning for people with weak hearts to think twice about climbing! Needless to say, the views from the top are breathtaking, giving a very nice perspective over the temple complex and providing a glimpse of temples in the distance. Unfortunately for us, the highlight of the temple carvings - The Churning of the Sea of Milk - was closed for restoration during our visit. This impressive mural runs along the whole Eastern Wall of the complex and depicts one of the central tales of Hindu mythology and depicts the epic battle between gods and demons that resulted in the creation of the elixir of life.

From our rushed visit to Angkor Wat we proceeded to some lesser temples on what is known as the "minor circuit" - the beauty of these temples is that they are skipped over by the coach parties, meaning we were almost alone in our meanderings around the temples of Banteay Kdei and Prasat Kravan.

From Prasat Kravan it was another short tuk-tuk ride to one of the most famous of the temples of Angkor - Ta Prohm - also known as the jungle temple, and home to many Hollywood blockbusters like Tomb Raider. This is the only temple that has not been cleared of jungle cover. The temple here is being restored gradually, but it seems that the authorities would like to leave the ambience of the temple "unspoiled" to give an idea of what it was like for the French explorers when they rediscovered the temples hidden in the jungle.

The climax of our first day exploring the Angkor Heritage Park was the city of Angkor Thom, an incredible walled square of 12km x 12km housing several temples, decorated terraces, a giant reclining Buddha and of course plenty of hawkers! By this time the cloud cover had cleared and the late afternoon sun was casting an enticing golden glow on the temples.

The most imposing of the temples inside Angkor Thom is Bayon, with its over 200 carved faces watching over visitors, said to be made in the likeness of King Jayavarman VII who built the temple. There are plenty of bas reliefs to rival the ones at Angkor Wat here, depicting scenes of rural Cambodian life in the 12th Century.

Onwards across the city we came to Baphuon, the temple that houses a 70m long reclining Buddha. The features of the Buddha are barely visible, but it must have been an impressive site back in the day, and I'm sure it will be once the restoration works are complete. This temple is one of the many victims of the Cambodian civil war: it was meticulously taken apart and catalogued by a team of French restorers who had to abandoned their work with the onset of war. All their records and notes were destroyed by the Khmer Rouge, leaving Baphuon as the world's largest jigsaw puzzle.

The highlight of our second day of temple exploration was the somewhat distant, but definitely rewarding temple of Banteay Srei. The temple is smaller than the other great temples of the complex, but what it lacks in size it makes up for in detail. Everywhere you look the sandstone is intricately carved and very well maintained. Hats off to the team of Swiss restorers, who not only have brought this temple back on its feet, but provide the most detailed information of any of the temples. If anyone from the Cambodian tourism authority is reading this - take note! The complex of Banteay Srei has an adjacent information centre with detailed and informative displays about everything to do with the temple - its discovery in the 19th Century, the early restoration and the more recent Swiss repairs, an interpretation of the carvings and plenty of history and background information.

Our third and final day in Siem Reap was dedicated to exploring the old market, Psar Chaa, and the temples of Raulos. The market houses everything you could possibly need - food stalls, clothing, souvenirs, fruit and vegetables, hardware, all the different bits and pieces of a motorbike (you could make a bike like a jigsaw puzzle here)… the list goes on and on! Beyond the market attractions in Siem Reap are minimal - there are a couple of Buddhist temples that can be visited, but the big drawcard here is obviously the temples of Angkor. Obviously a great way to kill time is to sit in one of the many bars and cafes that populate the city and just observe the traffic and the people while sipping an iced coffee or a delicious fruit smoothie - just the ticket for whiling away a hot afternoon!

Eating out in Cambodia is a fun affair - most places have menus in broken English (bleak coffee anyone?) and helpful staff who try to explain what's in a dish, though the explanation doesn't always match the finished article! Still, that's part of the charm of travel! Being one to try new things, I leaped at the chance to eat Frogs fried with lemongrass and basil. Top marks to the chef for that combination, the food was really tasty, even though there was hardly any meat on the frogs.

I still haven't racked up the courage to try that quintessential Cambodian snack - fried crickets - but there's still plenty of time for me to get a taste!

For more pictures from Siem Reap and the temples of Angkor, click here

Bye bye, Terra Australis!

Coober Pedy

When we arrived in Australia Justyna and I were fishing for opinions from relations and friends about our undertaking in the outback - was it a crazy idea? was it worth doing? were there better ways to spend our time? - the range of answers we got was wide and varied. Some suggested that we should visit special doctors if we ever again seriously thought about undertaking such a drive, others wished us well. Some told us to only do half the trip, and take a flight the rest of the way. Others said we should have done all our trip in a car. The one common thread to their answers was that "beyond Uluru there's nothing to do". As you can imagine it was with a steely determination that we pulled out of Yulara with a full tank of petrol ready to take on "the great void" that exists between Uluru and Adelaide - more than 1,400km of open road still lay ahead of us!

Our next destination from Uluru was Coober Pedy, known as the Opal Capital of the World. In the land of superlatives, Coober Pedy must be the most superlative city of them all! It not only lies in the middle of nowhere, but it is surrounded in its immediate vicinity by a series of opal mining shafts for a radius of some 50km, and beyond that is the Woomera Forbidden Zone - an area where the Aussie military tries out its bombs! If that weren't enough, Coober Pedy is a town built in the middle of a desert!

As you are driving along the Stuart Highway you notice that even the sparse vegetation that there is begins to peter out into nothingness - all that we could see were very low bushes and lots of spinifex grasses. In the distance to the east we could see the Breakaway Ranges and the painted desert, but these were out of bounds for us in our rented van - the road to the painted desert is all dirt! When we got to within 50km of Coober Pedy a large sign greeted us warning that we should be cautious about walking backwards, especially when taking photos, because of the deep mine shafts. And that mining with explosives could be taking place. And that it is illegal to trespass on somebody's property, and we could face a A$1000 fine! That is if we hadn't already fallen into a mine shaft and been blasted to smithereens! Then we saw the hillocks - the flat landscape suddenly sprouted little mounds a couple of meters high, and strange trucks with a barrel on the end of a long pole dotted the landscape between the mounds. We were in Opal Mining country at last.

It all started some time around 1915 when a 15-year-old accompanying his father's gold prospecting party noticed a piece of Opal lying on the ground - he was Australia's first Opal fossicker and with his action cemented Coober Pedy in the history books. The first attempts at mining for Opal weren't very successful - early prospectors applied their knowledge of gold mining to Opal, but the minerals are very different and the miners had very little success. It was only after the Great War that opal mining in Coober Pedy began to bear fruit. The story goes that a couple of returning soldiers decided to go out into the desert to try their luck at Opal Mining, having built up a considerable knowledge of trench digging back in the old continent. They approached Opal Mining with a new and wily scheme - they went looking for rabbit holes - if the soil displaced by the bunnies bore traces of opal they would stake a claim and start digging!

Opal mining in Coober Pedy was a very difficult undertaking not just because of the task of mining itself, but also because of the harsh environmental conditions. The region gets less than 5cm of rain in a year, daytime temperatures regularly exceed 50C and the nights are freezing. If you didn't get scorched during the day, you were sure to get frozen at night. And if that didn't happen, you would die of thirst. The miners of Coober Pedy quickly realized that the best place to be was underground, where its a constant 22-25C summer and winter. Abandoned mines were expanded into houses called dugouts. Nowadays Coober

Pedy boasts an underground hotel, two underground churches (Roman Catholic and Serbian Orthodox), the world's only underground camping, plenty of underground motels, underground bookstores, underground art galleries… the list goes on and on!

I guess here is a good place to mention where the name Coober Pedy comes from - its an anglicized corruption of the Aboriginal name for the place - Coopa Piti - or White Man's hole in the ground!

We spent the night at Riba's Underground Camping, which is a few kilometers out of town. The friendly owners took us on a tour of an old Opal Mine (the first one on the site of their campground) and explained some of the ins and outs of Opal Mining. We even got to try our hand at using divining rods. For those of you who are wondering what divining rods are - sticks or metal rods held looses in your hands that will wobble or cross each other when you walk over underground water, a hole in a pipe, or a seam that may or may not bear opal. There's no scientific explanation for how they work - they

just do! The twelve people in our mine tour all tried their hand at the divining rods, and all got a positive result within a few meters of each other. The trouble with using divining rods to locate prospective Opal mines is twofold - firstly, the seam in the ground that you locate may not have any opal in it at all (Opal started life as a liquid form of silica that gathered over non-porous seams of rock in the ground); and secondly, if you do find Opal, there's no guarantee that it's of the precious kind! It is only a small percentage of Opal that has undergone the correct chemical and physical processes to turn it into gem quality material, the rest of the opal is commonly called Potch, or non-gemstone quality white opal for the boring, pedantically minded among us.

Once a seam has been located (using divining rods) the prospective miners read the surrounding ground and out of experience predict the direction of the seam. They then stake a claim with the mining department office in Coober Pedy, which gives them a right to dig anywhere in an area of 50m x 100m for the next six months. From there its a matter of throwing your hat onto your claim, and starting to dig where the hat lands. Opal Mining is really one great big gamble, but don't let the miners hear you say that… its a touchy subject! The hit and miss nature of Opal mining has meant that there are no big corporations out here - and there never will be. Most mining operations are owned by a single person or a group of friends, and deals to mine together are usually made over a beer and a handshake at the local pub.

Coober Pedy provides an opportunity for those in passing to try their hand at fossicking - sifting by hand through the topsoil looking for Opal! In a remote corner of town is Jeweller's Shop Road, a dirt track surrounded by mounds of crushed earth from the earlier mining days, and you can try your luck at finding things that the miners missed. While we were there we saw one local with a small pickaxe and a couple of plastic boxes - he looked like he plied the Jeweller's Shop Road opal fields on a regular basis. I did give fossicking a try but I didn't strike it lucky - all I got was a mildly shiny piece of porch and some interestingly patterned rocks.

Having exhausted the attractions provided by Coober Pedy we hit the road again, for home stretch - 700km to Adelaide!

I've uploaded all the photos from our trip to Australia on Picasa, click this link to see them!

Leaving Australia

The trip from Coober Pedy to Adelaide was uneventful - lots of open road with changing scenery that got greener as we neared Adelaide, but we didn't much care for that as we had a greater problem on our mind.

Justyna and I were meant to be flying to Thailand in a couple of days (the 25th of May to be precise) but the situation in the country was pretty bleak; the foreign office was advising against all but essential travel to the country, and most airlines were canceling their flights to Bangkok. This meant that our time in Adelaide was spent in the library trying to figure out where we could go!

Vietnam was out of the question because of Visa issues - there wasn't enough time to get a Visa and the country doesn't have a Visa on arrival program. This left us with Cambodia as the only viable option thanks to their e-Visa and a cheap flight with JetStar via Singapore.

This hectic planning pretty much took up our last few days in Australia, but luckily we didn't have plans for much sightseeing or activities - Adelaide (and Perth) are much like any other Australian state capital with some regional variations. Once we had our flights booked and visas confirmed we spent our last few days in Oz in hostels winding down and reading up about Cambodia and the temples of Angkor Wat - our first experience in South East Asia.