Coober Pedy the Opal Fields

Tues 24 Mar… woke up to wind, rain and an electrical storm. The trip we are booked on doesn’t leave until2pm and we are hoping it will clear. Coober Pedy, apart from opals is also famous for it’s underground houses and hotels, in fact, most of the population (2,500) live underground.The miners from years ago found it was cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter and that’s how it all began.
We dodged the rain to walk into town to the underground bookshop where we bought more books and yesterdays newspaper, it is always a day late here. At 2 o’clock we meet at reception with our new friend Colleen ( Thelma is the van) to go on our trip round the opal fields and mines. We are first taken to the very nice Caves Hotel for a talk on Opals and their merits by our guide, Gunther, a German ex-miner who knows everything about opals. Then we were off to see what we thought were mines but in fact these rocky out crops were like a housing estate. The houses are ex mines which were dug and then converted into homes. They even have a golf course without a blade of grass to be seen. They did have a very nice looking clubhouse. On then to the opal fields, which are literally vertical holes in the ground, 1.5M in diameter we heaps of spoil dotted around like hundreds of walnut whips. We saw the claims that Gunther mined and he showed us a few of the opals he had found which he is saving for his pension. After some hair raising driving on some dirt and stone roads our bus arrives at the spectacular Breakaway Reserve, sandstone outcrops where we lookout over what was once an inland sea ,about 20 million years ago then we drove over the flats which are referred to as the Moon Plain, Mad Max and other films were filmed here. We also saw the longest fence in the world, the dog fence which is 5,300K long but we were not sure whether it was to keep the dogs (Dingos) out or in! Nobody knows whether it works. We were then taken to a typical underground home Very spacious, all amenities but no natural light. This one seemed to be in a 70’s time warp. The surfaces of the walls and ceiling are now given a coat of varnish/acrylic stuff to prevent dust falling. Onto the Serbian Orthodox underground church, a large cool chamber with several sculptures done by a miner who was also an ice sculptor, but he didn’t get much chance to practice in Coober Pedy. They told us this church was the only one of it’s kind….who are we to argue! Back to the Caves Hotel for a complimentary beer. The weather did clear and it’s back to hot.
Gunther was a mine of information!