Coober Pedy

Well it certainly is a different place to come into. It looks like a whole lot of giant gofers have been at work and nobody has cleaned up after them! The mounds start kilometres out of town and go right into town. They have dug thousands of holes in the search of opals, most of them abandoned, with a few are being mined while the rest of the miners just keep digging holes.
We had a tour through The Old Timers Mine, now a museum, which was really interesting. The rock they had to dig through wasn’t what you would call soft but all that did was slow them down a bit. They follow water seams down till they find where the opal has formed and bingo there’s your reward. Usually not very big and not worth a lot, but chase it they do, not a lot of rich people in Coober Pedy. They made their money and left, but the rest keep digging.
We also visited an underground house which in the winter, it gets very cold outside , inside 23 degrees and in the summer time 50 + outside but still 23 degrees inside. Also if they needed more room for whatever, they just dug through the wall and hey presto you have an additional room, hopefully the neighbor isn’t to close . This lady who owned the house had a mine as well and she did become rich , so much so she installed a indoor swimming pool which was unheard of , especially when your allocation of water was one 200 litre drum a fortnight per household. She had to buy the rest from Port Augusta and get it transported up to Coober Pedy. As a footnote she did sell her house and mine a few years later and bought the Exchange Hotel in Brisbane. They also had underground churches of which we visited the Serbian one. Very very beautiful but it did make the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.
The only place of real note was the pizza joint , here they served a pizza they called the coat of arms, bloody huge. It’s called the coat of arms because it had kangaroo and emu ( road kill ) as the meats , delicious.Read more