Day 120 - Coober Pedy - Monday 13th February 2012

After another early start and some breakfast, we continued through the arid scenery towards our next destination, Coober Pedy. Along the way we did our usual stops at various garages but the most interesting was the border crossing from the Northern Territory over to South Australia. It was literally a line in the sand! We walked over and back several times and did the usual wow's at the time difference a border can make (South Australia is 30 minutes ahead of the Northern Territory). Once this was done we drove on for a while before stopping at the longest manmade structure in the world - the Australian dog fence! It stretches for 5,600 km's and is twice as long as the Great Wall of China. And its sole purpose is to keep the wild dogs (dingos) out of the sheep country.

Back in the car for a few more hours and we arrived at the flat topped mesas, 'The Breakaways' which are sand formations in the desert. We returned to the van ready to drive the next 30 minutes to Coober Pedy when we realised we had a flat tyre. After an hour of all the men trying to prove they were the best at changing a tyre we were finally sorted and on our way.

We spent the afternoon exploring the Coober Pedy; it's the opal capital of the world and is basically famous for its mining of opal. It's a funny kind of town - everyone sleeps underground as it's so hot and after late morning you literally do not see anyone around the town because it's too hot; it's hard to believe that the town has a population of over 3,000 people!

Once we'd put our bags in our underground hostel, we went to the opal museum to watch a video on the town's mining of opal history, saw an opal cutting demonstration and also had an old mine tour. It was pretty interesting and to be honest we didn't realise that opal was so valuable - in the shop they had an opal worth $250,000!!

After the tour we had a couple of hours to kill so Ad and I walked around the town before heading to Josephine's gallery which had baby kangaroo feeding at 5.30pm. In my eyes, this was the highlight of Coober Pedy. The couple who own the gallery also save injured or baby roo's whose mum's have been run over and then raise them until they are ready to go back into the wild. They had a total of 9 roo's, the smallest being no bigger than a new born baby - it was soooooo cute!!

Sunset was ready by the time we'd finished with the baby roo's so we made our way up to a sand pile and watched it descend into the red sand and then headed to the best restaurant in town - Joe's Pizzeria. We munched on lots of pizza and washed them down with a few beers and then headed to the famous underground bar. Ummm well the bar wasn't very underground and was a bit of an anti-climax as it just felt and looked like a normal bar but with dodgy plastering on the walls. We stayed for a beer and a game of pool and then headed back to our place for a few more drinks and a night of sitting with the group and making jokes about our love of Cobber Pedy and wanting to live there! At the end of the night Merle, Stefan, Mareille, Ad and I had come up with a business plan to create flip flops with an opal in the strap - I'm not sure how successful our idea would be but it made us laugh a lot!