Coober Pedy

On the road to Coober Pedy (prounced peedy):

Coober Pedy was different and I enjoyed staying in the underground motel. It wasn’t as completely underground as we expected – it was built into the side of the hill. We  had expected to have to climb down a ladder or stairs to get in! We certainly had a good sleep though.

Opal mining has really destroyed what was probably a nice landscape. The area has been dug up and miles and miles of tailings are being left to make it look ugly.

It didn’t take us long to exhaust the things to do in Coober Pedy. There were lots of shops selling opals (but we didn’t buy any). Besides the shops, we visited the Old Timers Museum (underground), the Serbian underground church (simple by some standards but awesome), the dingo fence, a working opal mine, and did a bit of noodling (looking through some tailings for some opals). Needless to say we were unsuccessful in noodling!

The underground Serbian church:

Around the town:

The Old Timers Mine:

We saw the “moon” area where many films used the landscape as the moon (Mad Max for one). All you could see there were rocks and dirt.

the desolate Moon looking area

We drove to the Breakaways for the awesome view (about a 50km round trip).

And saw the dog fence (aka the dingo fence):

the sign says “Floodway”. Yep, there can be floods!

There were a few interesting things around town:

Some things didn’t seem to be open because it’s summer here and 1 shop owner wouldn’t even turn on his lights for us. He told us to go to another store because we wouldn’t buy anything from him anyway! Very different type of people. I guess they would have to be to live there. 

We enjoyed our quiet evenings sitting on the front verandah of the motel drinking wine and relaxing after hot day. Yes, I even enjoyed a bottle of wine over the weekend!

Thanks to Viv and Pete for putting me up and putting up with me. Thanks for the great time.

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