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.
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