I drove that day, since we were coming up on
Coober Pedy, which was my thing to see on the trip. I had been told especially to visit Coober
Pedy by my cousin Breena. In their year
in Australia, she and Will had spent some time there and had gone noodling
(fossicking, except for opals, which you “noodle”) and brought a few home for
some of us back home. I was excited to
see the place because it had come so highly recommended.
We went into town and grabbed a burger for lunch (Gwen ate celery from her stocks, since she was on a super budget). The other went to the grocery store for necessities while I ran down the street to the visitor’s center. I asked about noodling and the guy at the desk who had been so loudly critical to another couple about something mundane like property taxes, mocked me and treated me like I was some dumb backpacker with big dreams of striking it rich with no real effort. This annoyed me, but I took his information and stalked off (I really only stalked off in my head... my departure was actually polite and normal because I'm a pansy about confrontation)
He had pointed me in the direction of the plot in
the city limits where the mining operations had dumped their tailings that they
had pulled out of the mine shafts and already sorted through. Basically, it was refuse that had only small,
low-value opals here and there. We went
to the hills and I followed his instructions to dig in one place and then keep
digging all the way to the middle.
Because apparently the opals would be in the middle, not just lying in
the top foot of dirt.
And I dug and dug in the same spot without even a
shred of luck. Oh well. I had noodled.
I went to find the others, who had all found at
least one tiny opal. Haha, I had such
horrible luck, even though I was the one interested in noodling in the first
place. Joe and I looked for a while
longer together and found column after column of the shiny basalt, but nothing
else. Before long Jojje the crazy driver
came bouncing over the huge hills, the shocks of his car stretched to the
max. We gave up and got in, still happy.
From there we went to an art “gallery” of sorts,
with amazing aboriginal style paintings.
They were beautiful and unique and just the sort of thing I would want
on the walls of my house, but sadly I am still too poor to invest in that right
now.
But then we saw the sign for baby kangaroo
feeding! We only had to wait a couple of
minutes and then we got to go see the kangaroos and wallabies that this family
had taken in. Most of them came from the
mom’s pouch when she was hit and killed by a car, so these people would go pick
them up and take care of them. (During our conversations about animals came the most famous line of the whole trip, coming from Marco: "Man, you kill a koala, you got a bad heart.") I think
it is mostly out of the goodness of their hearts, but maybe eventually became a
way to make a little extra money.
Nothing wrong with doing good, even if partially motivated by personal
gain!
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| Marco and I get to touch the little guy! |
We went to the liquor store by the grocery store
and bought some wine. I stayed in the
car, but Jojje came back empty handed because they had asked him for an ID and
his passport was buried at the bottom of his bag. So I went in and bought for him, but the
cashier knew exactly what was going on.
He asked me if my friend had come in for the exact same beers. Sadly I lied, which I should have just been
honest. He didn’t look convinced and he
came out from behind the counter to watch me walk to the same car Jojje had
walked to. I felt like such a dirt-bag and
like he was going to call the cops on me.
I sulked a bit.
We headed back in the direction we had come from
to this free campsite behind a memorial.
It was a very interesting place because the memorial really was ho-hum,
but then behind it the ground sunk into this big bowl where glamper after
glamper was arranged for the evening. We
felt like part of the community for camping for free, yet at the same time like
outsiders because we didn’t have the intense set-up that the others had.
We got started in on the wine, but Joe and I
didn’t get much more than tipsy. Marco
got nice and drunk off his port (Cam had re-awakened his love for port), and
Jojje and Gwen seemed moderately intoxicated.
In the morning Jojje was frantically looking for
the shovel that someone had moved. When
he found it, he couldn’t just dart behind a bush because there were no
bushes. We were in the serious
outback. He had to jog (trying to look
as though he wasn’t going to poop his pants) a ways to where there was a slight
hill that he could get away with using as cover. He walked contentedly back.
There was one other car that hadn’t gone yet once
we were ready to leave, but as we were about to head back up and out of the
bowl in the freshly-packed car, Jojje suddenly realized he didn’t have his phone. We checked in some of the obvious places in
the car, then headed back to our campsite.
Jojje thought he had it that morning, sometime before, ahem, using the
shovel. We scanned the whole area,
checked nooks and crannies in the car, and then Jojje walked out to the hill to
see if he had put it down while “doing his business.”
No dice.
Jojje felt satisfied in our search of the camp and suggested we move on,
thinking that it would turn up somewhere in the car, since we couldn’t find it
outside. We did head in to Coober Pedy
on his urging, but he would never find the phone again.
We went in to town again to look around some
more. Another bit of information that I
had gleaned from the rude information center was that Coober Pedy had this
curious habit of building underground.
The heat in the Red Center of Australia was so intense during the days,
and especially during dry season, that it made more sense to build underground
because the dirt stayed at a constant and ideal temperature. We had seen that there were a couple of
underground churches in the city, so we wanted to head there.
First though, was laundry. We were all pretty ragged already, so we put
together our dirties and started them at the laundromat. Since Joe had a nice new jacket, he didn’t
want to leave the clothes alone and get them stolen, so he stayed behind. The other four of us went to a small and neat
underground church. It was amazing how
beautiful they could make walls made out of dirt look. We filled up our supply of water on the way
back and then found a museum. I realized
that Joe might be sad to be left out of a museum, so I went to get him. Most of our stuff was dry by now and since
the others didn’t seem to mind leaving their clothes unsupervised, I picked him
up and brought him to the museum.
The entryway to the museum was on the side of a
hill and within steps of entering the place, you started going more and more
under the earth, until you got down into an opal sales counter and the end of
some very nice exhibits. Here also was
the start of a mine tour, something Joe and I were both interested in. Gwen, whose budget was so tight, didn’t feel
like spending the money, so Jojje gave her the keys and she went to the
laundromat. The four of us did the tour,
which started in like five minutes of us deciding to do it--perfect timing!
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| Joe in the mine! |
It started with a short movie—a pretty cheesy
one, but interesting. We got to tour an
old mine shaft down under even the low level of the museum. We learned that opal was discovered in
layers, so miners would dig straight down until they found a ribbon of opal,
and then they would follow the ribbon horizontally until they had exhausted it
of its opal. Opal was formed by organic matter under sea water, where the
silica (sand) would slowly replace the calcium (like bones and shells) of the
organisms. The opal therefore was just a
special kind of fossil. Very cool. We also got to see an underground home, which
is very common there. I thought it maybe
was a gimmick thing that they played up in the tourist material but was
something that was unrealistic for most locals.
Turns out that something like 80% of the houses in Coober Pedy are
underground!
We walked to the laundromat, loaded up, went
quickly to the grocery store again, then filled up on gas. We had one more stop before hitting the road:
an underground Greek Orthodox Church. It
was beautiful!
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| The overhead view |
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