Coober Pedy

Tuesday 11th August 2009
We didn't have a particularly early start today but by 9am we were travelling East for 100km before turning South for 70km and then East again for 110km until we were back on the Stuart Highway at Erldunda where we turned off 4 days ago. Our little side trip to Uluru, Kata Tjuta and Kings Canyon took some 800km of driving in total and was well worth the effort.
At Erldunda, on the Stuart Highway we turned South heading for Home. About 80km down the road, at Kulgera, we filled up the car before heading across the Border into South Australia. Further South, at Marla, we had another fuel stop and ate our lunch while driving. By 5:30pm we rolled into the Stuart Range Caravan Park at Coober Pedy having covered a total distance of 753km on this rather warm day where the temperature topped at 32°C. It took us a total of 8.5hrs (including fuel stops) on the road to cover this distance which is the longest on our trip so far.
Once we got to Erldunda the landscape became pretty flat and had that very dry Desert look. The predominant colour of the soil was still a brownish red but it changed somewhere along the track to a very light, almost white colour. The last 50km into Coober Pedy were rather interesting as both sides of the road are littered with mullock heaps from Opal mining. As we got closer to Coober Pedy the heaps got higher and covered the whole landscape from horizon to horizon. Opal mining is huge everywhere around this place. Most of the mullock heaps had a whitish look about them and there was no sign of the reds we had experienced in the Centre.
Water is very limited out here, so limited in fact that the Caravan park has no water available on the sites and showers are charged at $0.20 per 3 minutes.
On the bright side, there is no charge for flushing the toilets!
We parked the Caravan just as the sun was setting in yet another wonderful outback colour display. A short drive around town gave us a bit of an overview of Coober Pedy. There are a lot of houses and Motels built underground to keep things cool during the hot summer. The whole town is focused on Opal with numerous shops and outlets for the colourful gemstone. As far as the town itself goes the best analogy I can find is "Living in a Quarry". From an elevated Lookout we could see that total absence of anything resembling grass (or even weeds) or brown soil - everything is this slightly off white sandy stuff which doesn't support any life at all.
A bit further up the road we were reminded of the harshness of the outback when we went past the western end of the Oodnadatta track where a Swiss tourist lost her life in 1998 when she walked away from her hire car after a breakdown. Since then it is a requirement for hire vehicles to be fitted with Emergency Location Transmitters and there is a memorial to her death on the Oodnadatta track.
There is nothing pretty about this place but it is certainly interesting. There must be plenty of Italians around as Coober Pedy has it's own "Italian Miners Club" - I suppose the Godfather would be rather busy out here keeping all this gemstone mining under control.
In the last few days the kids have started to talk about all the things they're going to do when they get home, not that they are home sick, but I think they are looking forward to returning home which might be by the end of this week.