Coober Pedy Part 1

I am sure everyone says it but this place is seriously something else. It is so different to anything you will see anywhere else in Australia.

You see loads of these blower vehicles in Coober Pedy

The drive to Coober Pedy from Woomera is interesting, although the last 100km is kinda slow and drags a bit. The scenery changes so much throughout the drive. About 100km south of Coober Pedy the vegetation becomes very sparse and you start to get a true sense of the vast distances and absolute isolation of the true outback. You see it before as there is so much distance between towns, but when the vegetation is sparse and very low growing, and the horizon is so incredibly far away, you just get an even greater sense of how vast our country really is. As you come in towards Coober Pedy the landscape changes to include a lot of mullock heaps. These are the piles of dirt dug out as part of the opal mines and left in varying sizes of stockpiles. Some are small heaps, leftover from an exploratory dig, and others are massive mounds from what must be open cut mines.

 Hart Lake

 Sparse vegetation (you don't get to see how red the dirt is unfortunately)

The first mine, rather than exploration site, that we saw

We stayed at RIBA's Underground Camping. This is a pretty cool place to stay. It is the site of a former opal mine, and is set slightly out of town in among the mullock heaps. I would definitely recommend it as a unique and interesting place to stay. They have an underground TV room and you can explore the underground camping area as well. The kids loved it and they loved digging around the bottom of the mullock heaps, finding potch (opal without colour or "common" opal, as opposed to precious opal).

The views of the town and the streetscape is so interesting, with around 75% of the population living underground. We all really enjoyed our visit and could have happily stayed another day to do some more exploring.

One of the key activities for tourists is noodling. Noodling is fossicking through the mullock heaps for opal. The town has set aside a rather large area of mullock heaps for tourists to go noodling. Primarily all you find is potch but we managed to find some very small pieces of potch with a little bit of colour in them.... very exciting stuff for the kids. I can see the attraction in opal mining... that elusive hope of striking it big. I could almost be tempted to move there and try it for a while.

Noodling with friends

On our second night there was a storm, complete with thunder and lightening. The rain only lasted a short while but it was amazing how much damage it did to the dirt roads  (which is pretty much all the roads but the main one). Rick at the caravan park said that if it had have rained much longer the road in and out to their caravan park would have been closed. We had ummed and ahhed about whether or not to make the drive out to Ackaringa and visit the Painted Desert. We'd talked about doing that and going on to visit Oodnadatta. I would have loved to see the Painted Desert but with the storm and the damage to the road, we decided it wasn't worth the risk and the road to Oodnadatta was closed. So my decision was made for me. The storm also stopped us from visiting The Breakaways, which we were disappointed about but we were so tired from doing so much it was probably a good thing.

One of my favourite parts of Coober Pedy...... a prop from the movie Pitch Black. I know, it's sad, but I love this movie. It is one of my favourites, so I was very happy to see it and get my photo with it. Of course, I had to touch it, just in case I was touching the same part of it that Vin Diesel touched (just kidding!).