The Drive to Coober Pedy

Me again!

Jen and I are now sitting in a cave - literally - in the underground hostel at Coober Pedy. This is a small mining town in the Outback of South Australia, and is famous as the opal capital of the world. It took us about seven hours to drive here from Kings Canyon, and let me tell you, what a drive it was!

For starters, driving south along the Stuart Highway made the drive we did in Western Australia look... um... busy. :-) The desert here in the Red Centre has a lot more vegetation than I was expecting, but even what plants there were kinda shriveled up and disappeared, the further south we got. The last couple of hours as we approached Coober Pedy, we were driving through scrub that reminded us uncomfortably of the Nullarbor! The last 45 minutes of the drive took us through opal fields, and thousands and thousands of mounds of potch (leftover dirt/rocks from opal fossicking). The place reminds me very much of the movie set for "Holes". The land is so flat here that I don't even know if I'll be able to snap a good photo to show how strange it is!

The only excitement in our long, long, LONG drive happened early on, before we even got to the Stuart Highway. We startled up a group of seven feral (wild) camels that were grazing alongside the road! After coming to a screeching halt (and yes, Mom, it was safe to do so, it wasn't like there was any traffic whatsoever!), we managed to snap some impressive photos! Then later on, we passed a man who was leading a pair of camels down the road. The camels were hitched to an old wreck of a car, and towing it as if it was a stagecoach. Very strange. Unfortunately we passed him too quickly to get a photo.

There was lots of roadkill today, and we saw many, many eagles and other birds of prey nibbling on the bones. There are no vultures here, so it appears that the eagles, hawks and kites fill in instead. Icky but necessary.

So now here we are in Coober Pedy, and staying in an underground hostel. Our dorm room is at the very end of a loooong, dark, creepy tunnel. Suffice it to say that I will be making VERY sure that I've gone to the bathroom before going to bed tonight! Yikes! Tomorrow Jen and I will explore the opal mines and museums and underground homes, and hopefully purchase some opals for ourselves. After all, since we're both October babies, opal is our birthstone!

I will fill you in on my Uluru/Kata Tjuta/Kings Canyon adventures later... gotta run!