Ribas'- not your average caravan Park. Nowhere else in Australia can you camp underground. Although you don't actually drive underground as some visitors thought according to Rick, the proprieter, you can either have a room in the disused mine, or sleep in a tent or swag in one of the open plan nooks. We opted for a tent for the boys and a air mattress with sleeping bags for Tom and I. Its strangely pleasant being underground- the air temperature is a constant 24 degrees, its very still and quiet, and the marks left by the tunnelling machine on the rock are beautiful, like swirly heiroglyphs. I, for one, slept like a dead thing.....
Included in the first night's camp is a tour of the rest of the old Opal mine with a bit of magic thrown in! We all had a go a divining the likely spot for a seam of Opal with the super thin copper wires and no word of a lie, the magic works for young and old. As Rick said though, no one can then tell you if its Potch (opal without beautiful colours) or the jackpot. Potch does not refract white light in the right way to make it valuable and this inability to easily tell whats beneath your feet until you eyeball it, is the main reason that Coober Pedy is still the domain of the little guy. $153 will buy you the licence to prospect an area 100m by 50m and you can only have one area under your name.
The landscape around the town would resemble a field housing hundreds of ant nests if it was viewed from the air. Everywhere is the mullock heaps of mini excavations. The size of the heaps relates to the type of investigation that has happened there. Waist high- thats a investigator drill, looking at the type of rock beneath the surface. Head high, thats the exploratory drill, about a meter in diameter- that went deeper to determine the lie of the land and the massive piles is when they've decided its worth actually mining, the claim has been staked and the mini excavating machines have gone in shovelling. There is a plethora of things to look at in CP, but our favorite was the fossicking areas- sort of sandpits full of the detritus spat out of real mines that have chips of opal seam and potch and very occasionally, a bit of rock that you can take home and polish up into your very own opal...We spent hours sifting and rinsing- its unbelievably addictive!
Two days was enough though and we left the miners to start the long drive to Uluru, 751kms away.