Coober Pedy

Well it’s the 3^rd of April and a sad day in the Bertha household today. Last night we used our last ‘free tissue’ and this morning is the last ‘free cup of tea’. All the ‘freebies’ from our month of travelling Tasmania in caravan parks have been used up. Every time we left somewhere, I would take the tissue box and all the tea bags. It was my little personal protest at paying such exorbitant fee hikes for the children. But oh well - we’ll have to pay our own way in tissues and tea from now on.

 We are currently back in Pimba, sitting in the same free camp spot where I wrote my last entry. We’ve been up the (thankfully made) Highway to Coober Pedy and are on our way back south to Port Augusta today. We can’t wait to meet up with Richard, Cath and Neavey in Adelaide soon. We have a great caravan park booked (ooh! More free tissues??) thanks to some lovely neighbours we met in Coober Pedy. They are travelling in an enormous 5^th Wheeler and it was a nice change for Dunc to be able to stand and watch someone else park for once. Usually its US attracting a crowd. They invited us in for a tour (another nice change since its always US giving tours…) and the kids had a fine old time riding their recliners just like they do Pop’s at home. Up… down… up … down while they watched the huge telly – how embarrassing. They suggested a wonderful park in Adelaide, which has lots of features the children will appreciate – jumping pillow, pool and splash zone!

Coober Pedy was interesting. For a while there, we thought we’d stayed one night too long, as everything was shut. There’s nothing on the way out there – the most boring drive we’ve had so far. I found it hard to stay awake as a passenger. Luckily Dunc is happy listening to his music as he drives. The town itself is not at all aesthetically pleasing. Half of it is underground and the rest is cobbled together from bits and pieces. More than half of the shops/attractions were shut with roller doors and shutters closing them off. Apparently the season here starts in April/Easter depending on who you talk to. It seems we were a week or two too early.

It’s a designated dry area and you are not allowed to take alcohol in to the whole town. (Fortunately the caravan park was a licensed zone and Dunc’s cupboard full of beer was ok). You are also asked not to take petrol in, to reduce the incidence of petrol sniffing, so Dunc emptied our jerry can into the generator and the RAV. They sell a modified fuel there called Opal, which can’t be sniffed. There are a lot of aboriginal people who still seem to be affected by drugs or alcohol though. Lots of people sitting around town mumbling to themselves, or lurching along the street. It was the first time our little middle-class children had really been exposed to that, so it made for some interesting conversations.

The entire town revolves around opals. Mining it, cutting it or selling it. Add a little aboriginal art in the form of paintings, carvings or didgeridoos and that’s about it. It was stinking bloody hot the entire time we were there. The forecast was for a lovely 23 – 25 before and after we were there, and the 3 days we were there it was 38, 39, 38. Sheesh! Also the only caravan park that could handle our big rig had a crack in the swimming pool and the local pool was closed because it was “too cold”. Really?!?

We went on the Old Timer Mine tour, which included a self-guided tour of an underground mine, a tour of a dugout house to see how people live underground and the ubiquitous opal gallery and gift shop. It also has a public noodling area out the front, where you can sort through mulloch or tailings and look for opals. We spent a good couple of hours there, but unfortunately being ‘out of season’ missed the display of the blower machines, which was only once a day at 9.30am instead of 4 times a day.

We also had a didgeridoo demonstration and the BEST thickshake in the world (nothing to do with the outside temperature..) at the underground café. Apparently there’s a big counterfeit didgeridoo market, where they are not hollowed out by termites. Who knew? We decided to skip the didgeridoo purchase, but did get a lovely carving of a goanna which the children have named Lizzie. I wasn’t interested in haggling down a price, but only later realized that the artist was unlikely to see much of the money we paid for it. L

The next day we thought we had nothing left to do, and decided to check out The Breakaways which had been mentioned by a friend on Facebook. We are sooo glad we did! It’s only about 35km from town and is the most beautiful patch of ‘desert’ we have seen. It reminded me of the Grand Canyon, in the way that it suddenly appears DOWN in the ground. Its not mountains that rear up high, more that the ground drops away and leaves mountains behind. Just beautiful and gorgeous colours in the sands. We didn’t take our ‘proper’ cameras with us and the horizon line makes it really difficult to photograph, so the images below don’t really communicate how wonderful it was.

We also went a little way further to see the Dog Fence. We had driven alongside it a fair bit on the Oodnadatta track, but Dunc wasn’t really in the mood to pull over for photographs! The Dog Fence used to run over 9000km from Queensland, through 3 states right to the coast in South Australia, but now it ‘only’ runs for about 5600km. It was built to keep the dingoes away from the settled areas in the east. Apparently dingoes can’t really jump that high.

We finished our time in Coober Pedy with a visit to the Kangaroo Orphanage, which had looked shut earlier. Apparently the locals all like to head out to their claims early in the hot days to look for opal. A local couple rescue kangaroos and hand rear them. We got to feed some older ones and watch a teeny tiny 6m old be fed by hand. Esther the joey had only just grown all of her fur and was taking her first couple of steps after each feed. It was a highlight for animal-mad Angus.