Am currently in Alice - staying in hotel so am taking opportunity to post a few more things - but my main camera is locked up in car and am too tired to bother going to fetch it - so will just include a few shots from my phone camera for now..... so because of this will just skip quickly through the past couple of days and later go through it all in detail.
Arrived in Woomera Monday morning. Visited my old home site, the hospital where I was born, the pistol club, etc, and we had "brunch" at Spud's Roadhouse. Continued up to Coober Pedy, arriving early afternoon, where we decided to "camp" yet again in a hotel. We made this decision as we had worked up a thirst on this first real day in the heat, and as any experienced bush traveller does, we wanted to conserve our supplies before heading further into the desert. So we found a fine establishment that served Bundy cans
I think this place was called the "Desert Cave" - had a very nice underground bar.
We had wanted to find underground accommodation - but as this stop was not planned we had no bookings. And to my surprise almost the entire town was booked out because they are currently filming the latest Mortal Combat movie here!
Coober Pedy is a bit of a bizarre place. Obviously, it exists only because of the opal mining. And those mining activities are in a bit of a boom phase. The basics of opal exploration/mining these days is that you punch an auger down 10-40 metres or so, looking at the material coming out to see if you get any opal. If you do, you make any even wider shaft with a bigger auger down to the layer, and then dig out sideways following whatever opal you get. I remember vaguely from my childhood that there were "quite a few" little piles of whitish dirt where people had made these shafts, but I was absolutely stunned at just how many there are now. Talking to a drilling crew at brekky the next morning, we were informed that there are now over 2 million holes within a 40km radius of the town!!
So mining is thriving, but the gear all looks like ancient, patched-together cough. It is a harsh place.
And the second big thing is tourism. It seems there is not a cafe or shop in town that doesn't sell opals - most of it cheap touristy stuff. The town is full of relics and closed-down shops - many failed business attempts. But as per the "Desert Cave" there are also flash succesful things.
Me being me, I always stop to ponder some of the little details. Just before leaving the next morning, I went into the IGA supermarket, just to get a bottle of water as I walked around town. I grabbed the cheapest one, which was on special - it was Fiji water, for the modest price of $2.
It is a strange world we live in. In an era where the favorite topic seems to be Global Warming, and included in that all the excesses there are in relation to resource use, I was sitting there in Coober Pedy drinking simple drinking water that had been shipped from a Polynesian island!
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