Dusty and Hot.......

That is Coober Pedy. Apparently the name comes from the aboriginal term kupa piti meaning white man's hole............. hmm were the aborigines having a leg pull ........ is it a little like moomba....... at any rate it is a hole, and mostly manned by white men, so I suppose it is apt. If, however they had named it the dusty hole, I would not have been surprised. As I write this it is 41.5C and 4% humidity. You shrivel into a dust covered old person merely by opening the door of the dug-out........so we have not done so since lunch time.

We went out yesterday afternoon to check out the Breakaways..... even nicer in the afternoon light than the morning......really nice. Excuse the overdose of photos.

and finally the moon over Moon Plain.

Apparently they shot a bit of one of the Mad Max movies out here. If you want post apocalyptic then this is the place. You could just as easily do any street in Coober Pedy.

Our digs (appropriate word) are in the left of the hill, behind the three tress growing on the mid-level.

Anyway, we did actually get out this morning to check out some views: and to do a little bit of an educational survey.

They rubbed out the graffiti, but did not correct the spelling

The well to do have their dug-outs away from the hurly burly on the hills north of town.

A close up....really typical. Inside it is probably beautiful

We then headed off to Crocodile Harry's an (in)famous dug-out. It was an opal mine, but when it was worked out Harry converted it into his home. Harry apparently is a weird local legend. Weird being the operative word. Imagine the William Rickets Sanctuary done as a Coober Pedy dug-out and dedicated to girls knickers and bras rather than aborigines and armageddon. Yep! Hard to shake it off really.

The golf course is awesome....fourth tee and third 'green'

We then did a bit of an Opal shop crawl. Lots of pretty stones, but the ones worth owning require a mortgage. We did enjoy chatting to a young man in his seventies at one of the shops. He had been taking care of his mother and when she died he decided he had better get out and see the Kimberleys as he did not fancy doing them with a walking stick in his 80s. So he packed up the caravan and the dogs and headed off from Thornbury. Apparently he was getting petrol at Coober Pedy when he got chatting to this bloke. Well before you know it he is apprenticed to the bloke, is the 11th actual opal miner in town, and runs the shop in the mornings. Been doing it three years....figures he isn't in his eighties yet. Interestingly he yearns for the old days, even though he wasn't here, but apparently people didn't bug you so much with questions when you wanted a bit of dynamite, and things were solved between men......one of them finding himself down one of the 5 million holes in the area....google maps actually shows some of the holes...... can't see any bodies though.

To back his story up a bit, the local IGA carries a gun safe as one of its stocked items. See, namby pamby stuff. Gun safe indeed!

11 miners, but every second door is an opal shop, or an underground back-packers or something to do with tourism. They even keep old movie props around, like this spaceship from Pitch Black. Just looks like any other piece of junk on the streets. So they want to do tourism, but the place is a junk heap......nothing wrong with keeping the space ship, but it is just rotting in the motel/opal shop car park.

We are staying indoors. Not so much the due to the weirdos.....I fit right in. But the dust and heat and dust and humidity and dust. We will come out for dinner and try to shoot some more stars from the motel roof before heading down to Port Augusta. Apparently it will be 22C and they have sea !!!