Day 9 – Coober Pedy.
Wow, not only did the scenery change but someone invited the flies to join us on our journey. Coober Pedy was hot and dry with millions of flies. When we were in Woomera we bought fly veil’s more to pacify the children than because we thought we would really need them, well I can tell you today we did not get out of the car without them on our heads!!
Coober Pedy is a special place and I think it must take a special person to choose to live here – personally wild horses could not drag me here with a removalist van!! And I have to admit I found it hard to get engrossed in the town and what it had to offer, luckily for Peter and the kids there were lots of things to see and do. We started with securing accommodation for the night and chose Riba’s Underground Camping Park – technically we were not camping underground but if you had a tent or swag then they had a spot marked our for you, the attraction for us was the night opal cave tour that they ran. The kids enjoyed exploring the underground area but I think they preferred doing burnouts on their bikes in the gravel that negated the need for grass.
The afternoon was filled in visiting local opal shops, opal museums, underground churches and the local Aboriginal Centre, and Pete’s highlight showing the kids a drive in!! Yep that’s right here in down town Coober Pedy they have a working drive in…..unfortunately there were not any movies showing tonight!!
The other highlight was the “Big Winch” – I know and we thought we had escaped “Big” things by not heading up the east coast.
The kids also had a go at Noodling, unfortunately all they found were pieces of gypsum and potch. Potch is worthless opal!! The kids though were excited by their finds and would have continued for hours if hunger hadn’t called them back to the caravan.
The kids were really interested in how people lived underground; Callum though is still convinced that living underground is not such a good idea in case there is an earth quake!! We did try to explain to him that Coober Pedy was not in a known earthquake area. I don’t think we convinced him though. From the hill where the big winch was we got a fabilous view of the Coober Pedy township particularily the underground houses and shops.
After dinner we went on the Opal Mine tour, it was really informative and gave us an idea on what we would need to do if we got bitten by the Opal bug and decided to stay and stake a claim and begin mining for Opals. The reality for me is it just reinforced why I would just go to the opal shop and buy the jewellery that I wanted, fossicking for Opals darn had work. We also learnt that 93% of all opal deposits found are potch!!. Zac was so disappointed that he didn’t find his fortune in the public noodling hills and to learn that what he found was worthless.
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