Coober Pedy, back to Alice, and home to Melbourne

I'm back!

Boy does it feel strange to be back in Melbourne after six weeks away.

Jen and I flew home late this afternoon, completing our adventures through the Red Centre. So let me bring you a little bit up to speed...

I last left off with us finding ourselves living in a cave in Coober Pedy. We arrived in town fairly late on Monday afternoon, so we only really had time to move our stuff in, hit the grocery store for a few essentials, and walk one lap around town (which didn't take long) to find a restaurant for dinner. I had hoped to eat at the Underground Cafe (after all, what's the point of visiting a town famous for its underground lifestyle if you don't take advantage of it?), but the cafe was closed! Apparently it's not quite the peak of tourist season yet. Sigh. We settled for eating at the local Greek taverna, which had quite nice food at (surprisingly) reasonable prices.

Sleeping in the caves had both its advantages and disadvantages. For instance, at least it was nice and dark and since we were waaaaaay down the end of the corridor, we didn't have anybody wandering by our alcove at random on the way to the bathroom. On the other hand, the alcoves that the bunks were in had no doors, so sound really travelled. I had to get up at about 12:30am to ask a group down the hall to be quiet. Then at 3am, a group in the alcove next to us came in (presumably from a bar, why else would they be so late) and they were very noisy. I was just about to get up and give them a (not so polite) piece of my mind when Jen trumped me. She heard me moving, leaned over the edge of the bunk and told me in a not-at-all-whisper: "Yeah, I know, it's 3am and they're still talking." All we heard from the room next door was "Oops! Sorry!" and then total quiet. What bliss! In the morning, I bowed down at Jen's feet and proclaimed her to be a Master of the Art of Shutting Stupid People Up. :-)

After breakfast, our first stop was the pharmacy. Once again, Jen had managed to have something bite her, and her arm was swelling up nicely and had all these fun little pussy blisters on it. GROSS. The pharmacist gave her some goopy gel to put on the bites to stop the itching. It seemed to work, but it also created a strange shellac-like covering over the bite - so it looked like her arm was varnished. Poor Jen. Can't we make it through one adventure without her getting chomped by something?

Next we hiked up the one hill in town in search of the Old Timers Mine. Coober Pedy really is a bleak place. I'm pretty sure it's one of the driest places in all of Australia, and it sure looked it. There's hardly any trees, grass, or other greenery. Many folks were growing cacti in their yards, but even those looked parched. I understand now why this part of Australia has been used to film end-of-the-world movies like the Mad Max series, and also Pitch Black (which I haven't seen, but Jen tells me is the prequel to the Chronicles of Riddick). In fact, before we found the mine, we stumbled across this bizarre sculpture garden, which we're pretty sure has set pieces from Pitch Black. Once I get all my photos organized, I'll post 'em online, and I'd definitely appreciate some comments on the Coober Pedy set!

The Old Timers Mine was pretty cool. It's an old opal mine from 1919 that has been preserved, to show how opal used to be mined here when the gems were first discovered in the area. It was an absolute rabbit warren of hand-cut caves and shafts, and we wandered through it for over an hour. We had to wear hard hats because both the ceiling and the floor were uneven and rather sharp. It was cool though - throughout the mine were all these displays, showing different parts of the opal mining process. There isn't one big opal consortium operating in Coober Pedy; for the most part the stones are mined by individuals, on privately-staked claims in the opal fields. These days the shafts are either hand-cut or gouged by machine, and a UV light is used to pick out the opals (instead of having to search through the potch by hand). It takes a ridiculous amount of work to find the opal. But what is cool about Coober Pedy is that a number of the small opal shops here are owned by folks who also have mines in the area, and they're displaying stones that they've gone and found themselves. Jen and I were on a serious search for some "bling" to bring home, but more on that later.

Besides the mine itself, there were two dugout homes as part of the display. Apparently this practice started when the miners began sleeping in their old, unused mine shafts. Over time the living spaces became more elaborate until whole homes were built underground. Let me tell you, in a climate like Coober Pedy's, where it gets to over 50C in the summer and below freezing in the winter with NO SHADE whatsoever, living in an underground home where the temperature is always hovering around 24C looks pretty attractive! One of the dugout homes on display dated from the 1920's and was very crude; the other was lived in until the late 1980's and had a full kitchen, bathroom, living room and two bedrooms. I especially liked how the family who lived there, when times were tough, would do a little 'excavating' in one of their rooms and see if they couldn't find a little more opal to tide them over. I mean really - how many homes do you know of, where if you chip away at one of the walls, you could find anywhere from $20 to $20,000 worth of embedded gemstones?

After leaving the mine, Jen and I wandered through a number of the town's opal shops on the way back to the hostel for lunch. Unfortunately, because it wasn't exactly high tourist season, about half the shops were closed. But we did start to get a good feel for how much good opal jewellery was going to cost us, and we saw a few pieces we liked.

Probably our strangest adventure of the day came after lunch, when we hopped in the car and drove about 5kms out of town to find Crocodile Harry's place. This guy lived in this crazy dugout home outside of town. He apparently died just a few years ago, and rumor has it that the character "Crocodile Dundee" may have been loosely based on the real-life Crocodile Harry. His home is now a museum, and a strange one at that. I can't really describe it. It was just nuts. Apparently his place was used in the filming of one of the Mad Max movies, I don't remember which one, and the story goes that Tina Turner left her bra behind accidentally. (???) Well, it got put on display. What with one thing leading to another, now the place is one strange shrine, full of underwear and all sorts of other oddities from all over the world. You'll just have to see my pictures to fully understand it.

Jen and I were really tired, so we headed back to the hostel once more to have a nap, and then walked across the street to the swanky Desert Cave hotel, which had its own opal and art shops. And would you believe it... here I was in Coober Pedy, looking for opals, and instead I finally found the piece of original Aboriginal art that I've been searching for! The painting I bought represents the story of the Pleaides (Seven Sisters) constellation, which is visible here in OZ just like it is back home. It's beautiful! And it only cost me $180!

We had one last stop to make in our shopping rounds, and that was to the Umoona Opal Mine and Museum. In the foyer, they had quite an excellent display about the fossil record of the area, including some great examples of opalized fossils. (Turns out that the famous opalized plesiosaur that we saw in Adelaide was from Coober Pedy.) And then we got to the opal shop, and fell in love. Jen and I both ended up choosing black opal pendants set in silver. We're very happy with our new "bling".

When we headed to bed later in the evening, we discovered another - um - challenge of sleeping in a cave. Jen, sleeping on the top bunk (she's been so good to me on our travels - I'll sleep on the top if I have to, but it's quite painful for me to climb up to the top, so if there's only one bottom bunk available, she always lets me have it), discovered that there were all these pebbles in her bed! They'd fallen down from the cave ceiling throughout the day. Yuck! Who wants to sleep with rocks (not sand, you Woolsey folks, I'm talking ROCKS here) in their beds?

We woke up on Wednesday morning to CLOUDS and RAIN! Not a lot of rain, but hey, we were in the middle of the desert! There was just enough water on the roads to allow us to hydroplane, so we spent a good chunk of the first part of our drive back to Alice Springs weaving all over the highway, trying to keep out of the puddles. This is not as dangerous as it may sound. There was NOBODY on the road with us, and we could see for MILES. Nevertheless, I was quite glad to make it to the end of the rain and have the road dry out.

Jen had the best car adventure on the ride back. While she was driving, we came across a group of four red kangaroos (as in, the biggest 'roo species in OZ), grazing at the side of the road. We were approaching the 'roos at 130kms/h (yes, this is the LEGAL speed limit in the Northern Territory - we weren't actually speeding!). The roos started to bound across the road. We saw them in time to allow Jen to brake and slow us down a bit, but there was no way we could stop in time. Hitting one of these roos would be as bad as hitting a deer - both for the roo and the car! She just (as she put it ) "aimed for the gap" between two of the roos and prayed. (Well, truth be told, there was a lot of swearing going on too, but I don't think the roos heard us.) Fortunately the remaining roo didn't jump at the car and we wove through the middle of the pack without hitting anything! PHEW!

We got back to Alice Springs around 3pm, and had enough time to check out the Alice Springs Cultural Precinct before it closed at 4. Among other things, there's a nice art gallery there, so we wandered around and looked at these beautiful watercolours of the landscape around The Alice, and paintings of birds and other wildlife. There was also a huge sculpture in the middle of the gardens in the complex, celebrating the Caterpillar Dreaming. The Arrente, the local Aboriginal people, believe that caterpillar spirit ancestors created the landscape around Alice Springs during the Dreamtime, and this sculpture told some of the stories associated with that creation. It was pretty cool.

All the driving and walking of the previous week were catching up to us though, and we were pretty happy to arrive back at the YHA for the night. Having had a car for so long, we'd gotten more than a little sloppy with all our packing, and it took us three trips to get all our stuff from our car into our room! (Shame!) We sat in the middle of the floor, spread everything everywhere (I swear it looked like a bomb had gone off) and repacked our bags for the train. Then we headed to the kitchen, made nachos for dinner, checked our email, watched a little TV in the common room, and headed for bed.

Yesterday morning we slept in 'till 8 (our previous experience on the trains telling us to get all the sleep we could!), then packed up and headed out. I dropped Jen and all our luggage at the train station, then drove the rental car back out to the airport (about 20kms away) to drop it off. (Why Europcar is the ONLY major car rental company in Alice Springs that doesn't have an in-town office is beyond me!). Once that was dealt with, I caught the shuttle bus back to the train station to rejoin Jen. After checking in, we still had quite a bit of time before the train left, so once we'd dumped our big bags, we walked back to the downtown to do a little more shopping. We arrived back at the train station at 12:10, since we knew that the train was supposed to start boarding at 12:15. To our surprise, they were already boarding the train! (When was the last time you heard of a train being EARLY??) Well, we got on the train, found our seats, and within 5 minutes, the train staff were locking the doors! We weren't scheduled to pull out of the station until 12:45, but we were rolling on our way around 12:40! Yikes! Glad we got back when we did!

The train ride was pretty good, all things considered. There weren't all that many folks in the seats, and Jen and I were able to rotate a set of seats around so we had a 4-seater block all to ourselves. This allowed us to put our legs up and stretch out, which was wonderful. Sleeping on the train was still a pain, though. I couldn't sleep with my back to the train wall 'cause my legs stuck out into the aisle. I couldn't sleep with my legs propped up on the opposite seats of our 4-block, 'cause there was no support under my knees and they kept going numb. If I tried to sleep with the chair back reclined, my butt would go numb and my back would cramp. In the end, I wound up on the floor of the train car, snuggled into the corner at the front of where our seats were (we had the first sets of seats at the front of the car). This at least allowed me to (a) stretch out almost fully and (b) support my stupid knees. I won't say I actually *slept* much, but it was definitely better than trying to doze in the seats. Jen, who stayed in the seats, fared no better than me. But at least it was just for one night.

Our train actually arrived 45 minutes AHEAD of schedule in Adelaide this afternoon, which was nice! We grabbed our luggage, hailed a cab, and headed to the airport. After a bit of repacking to stow the gear we'd needed for the train ride, we checked our bags one last time, enjoyed some wedges and sour cream at one of the airport's overpriced restaurants, and caught a plane back to Melbourne. One final cab ride brought us back to our house - at last!

It's good to be home. It's cold here though. Apparently it's 17C outside but my body insists it's colder! The seasons definitely turned while I was on my travels and we're now well into autumn. I'm currently wearing socks, shoes, and my polar fleece, and I'm still cold! I'm gonna be such a suck when I head back to Canada. Ah well - at least I get to sleep in my OWN BED tonight, for the first time in six weeks. And that's exactly where I'll be in about 5 minutes. I'm POOPED.

Tomorrow I'll write up our Uluru and Kings Canyon adventures, I promise, and work on posting some of the zillions of pics I've taken these last few weeks. In the meantime, goodnight!