Coober Pedy

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When we crossed the border into South Australia, it seemed like we hadn’t spent much time in the Northern Territory at all! But then much of the NT will be covered during part 2 of our trip :-) With a new state came our second time change; not that we’re all that concerned with what time it is though…



The oddly named town of Coober Pedy is known as the opal capital of the world. Australia has 95%!o(MISSING)f the world’s supply of commercial opal and the largest percentage still comes from the 70 opal fields around Coober Pedy. Some fellow travellers had told us that it was an awful place to be bypassed at all costs and others had hailed it as fascinating. As it turns out, it’s actually fascinating and not nearly as bad as the Lonely Planet might have you believe when it says “with swarms of flies, no trees, 50^oC summer days, sub-zero winter nights, cave-dwelling locals and rusty car wrecks in every second front yard, you might think you’ve arrived in a post-apocalyptic hell hole - but it sure is an interesting place!”.



Ok, so there are a lot of wrecks around and the locals clearly don’t care too much about making their town visually appealing, but the people are remarkably friendly (apart from the creepy opal seller from Hong who looked like he wanted to throw us down his 20m mine shaft when we didn’t buy any of his jewellery!). Half of the population live underground (I had had images of Fred Flintstone and Wilma, but the ‘caves’ are actually modern dig-outs with proper front doors) and there are numerous underground attractions. We had a coffee in the underground café, visited one of the underground churches and the underground museum, drove up the hill to the Big Winch for a good view of the area, ducked in and out of many opal stores and checked out the bizarre place that is Crocodile Harry’s. You have to see this place to believe it. Harry’s passions in life were women and crocodiles and the caves that were his home are stuffed to the brim with everything you can imagine: visitors’ underwear, paintings, bric-a-brac, books, figurines, retro furniture, photos, shells, whacky pieces of art, a few artificial crocodiles and much much more. We had no idea to whom the huge dogs that seemed to be guarding the place belonged, but they sure were gorgeous! Harry’s home featured in the underground scenes of the movie ‘Mad Max III’ and the spaceship that adorns the side of the high street featured in the movie ‘Pitch Black’.



We could certainly understand the appeal of living underground in this area. There’s not much you can accomplish when the temperatures hit the upper 40s, but underground it remains a pleasant and constant 25^oC. Given the choice, I would probably still choose a conventional house with air conditioning though; just imagine being without daylight for any length of time!



Dean caught a light case of ‘opal fever’ and bought a bag of rough rocks which, after being cleaning up, were really pretty with streaks of multi-coloured opal. Despite opal being my birthstone, I’m not a huge fan myself – which is probably quite a good thing because I would have been very tempted otherwise! That said, I did find a pair of lovely simple studs which had to be bought as a momento of our visit to Coober Pedy :-)



We also both enjoyed our visit to Josephine’s Gallery & Kangaroo Orphanage. The gallery features all sorts of opal jewellery and aboriginal art, but Josephine and her husband are nuts about kangaroos and care for any skippy that has been orphaned or hurt (mostly in car accidents) in the area. They have two daily feeding sessions during which you can make friends with a few kangaroos and learn about their stories. There was a little joey in their care at the time, so we were lucky enough to be able to watch it being bottle fed and take few bold hops around the backyard!



During our visit to the underground museum, I spotted a sign that touched something in me. It read “philosophers, social planners and plain common sense tells us we travel through life on paths marked out, explored and deepened by generations before us.” How true is that. Even on our travels, we meet the same people again and again as everyone follows the same path. As living one’s life goes, I guess it’s a good idea to follow the path as well as carve out one’s own route.

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