Coober Pedy
We were sooooo glad to see Coober Pedy!!! After surviving the gravel/sand/potholes/rock-boulders of the Oodnadata and William Creek tracks, the bitumen was a welcome sight. But Coober Pedy is a complex town and perhaps not the most welcoming at first glance. Dirty, dusty, shop windows barred up and dogs roaming the streets. The caravan park we stayed at locked their gates (and therefore us inside) from 10pm to 6am. It looks like a WILD wild west town. And it looks small, with not many buildings around among the hundreds of mounds of dirt. But then we came to realise there is a lot of wealth locked behind doors - opal is worth SO much!!! And two-thirds of people live in dugouts in the hills so you don't see the extent of the town. But it is an amazing place. We visited two museums -the Umoona museum which had really good information on aboriginal culture, the geology and how opal is formed; and also the Old Timers Museum where we actually walked through an old opal mine and saw how the "old timers" did it in the early days. We did some "noodling" and found some potch and maybe even a little bit of opal, then drooled over all the beautiful pieces in the shops that were way out of our price range. One piece of opalised fossil Bec looked at was priced $30,000!! It was nice, but not that nice! We finished our stay by visiting the Catacomb Church which is dugout in the shape of a cross. After the service, we had a tour and discovered that it is much larger than just the church area, with a 6 room rectory, kitchen, tea room, youth hall (that was massive) and old miners dugout. So it was quite extensive! They were all very friendly people and welcomed all the visitors/tourists in. In the end, Coober Pedy wasn't as bad as we first thought.