Taking the Good with the Bad, and hoping for Karma

Taking the Good with the Bad, and hoping for Karma: World Cup 2018 Russia

I’m writing this sitting on a high-speed train travelling at up to 220kph between St. Petersburg and Moscow, sipping on a Leffe Bruin beer after having a tasty light breakfast, this is the way to travel for sure. Today marks the day when we start the second part of our Russian World Cup odyssey by taking up residence in Moscow for the final stages of the competition.

The past week in St.Petersburg has been a continuation of the previous couple of weeks, with back-to-back football, either on the TV or lives at the stadium. We have been lucky to see some great games and soak-in the full World Cup experience, having seen Brazil just about squeeze past Costa Rica with 2 goals in injury time, and Argentina narrowly

defeat Nigeria to progress to the next round. I have also seen more than my fair share of games on TV, including England’s demolition of Panama, Germanys exit at the hands of the Swedes, and of course England less than convincing display against Belgium in a game that really didn’t mean much. However, like many things in life, there is nearly always a silver lining to every cloud, and our silver-lining is that England finishing second in the group mean that we will get to attend the Columbia v England Group of 16 match next week, so it’s not all bad.

In between times, Yates has been occupied acting as a tour guide and chaperone to his family that have arrived in the past week. I think Yates has probably spent more time at the airport in St.Petersburg than at the football stadium, either picking people up, dropping people of, or picking up missing bags, I

hope his family appreciates the hard work he has put in. Fiona & I have been left to our own devices and have had a wonderfully relaxed time touring the city and its many sites, attractions and parks, (and craft beer bars, Thanks Fiona). It really has been a great time for us.

Having the luxury of spending 3 weeks in the city, I think we have all found time to fall in love with St.Petersburg which is a city of truly splendid beauty & grandeur that genuinely rivals Rome, Paris or Barcelona. This may mean that Moscow may pale in comparison, but you never know, Russia has surprised us at every turn so far. I don’t know what I expected of Russia, but it has excelled in every way possible, the people are exceeding helpful  and nice, (exception ahead), the food and drink has been the equal of anywhere else I have traveled, and certainly

St.Petersburg was as far from the drab & dower perception of Russian cities as I can imagine. It just goes to show that you should never trust the media whose agenda is to downplay Russia at every opportunity or make the mistake of assuming that the country and people are reflective of the presiding regime. Russia is not Putin, and Putin is not Russia...! I can’t urge you more to visit this country and its people, it will change the way you see the world.

However, there is always a dark side to every bright side, and even though everyone we have met on our travels has been a credit to their country, there will always be an exception, and in this case, it is the AirBnB host we booked with for our Moscow apartment. Two days before we were due to arrive he contacted me to tell me he was cancelling our booking which had been in place for over a year, as

he had some guests in the apartment that were prepared to pay far more than we had previously agreed. This arse-munch was prepared to break our agreement for a short-term gain and leave us in the lurch to try and find accommodation for 8 people in Moscow during the final 2 weeks of the World Cup. Decency prevents me from using the language this sort of behavior deserves, but suffice to say that this guy should be ashamed of himself and that has done a massive disservice to his fellow Russians. Let’s hope that Karma gets this Knob-Jockey...!!!

The good news is that AirBnB customer support came to the rescue, helping us find alternative accommodation at short notice, and even helped with making up the difference in the cost, so hopefully, within the next couple of hours, we will see what our new apartment is like.

We have 3 more matches to

attend over the next 2 weeks, and we are now located conveniently close to the Moscow Fan Fest to be able to pick and choose which games to watch

there. Yates’s family are with us right now, but in a week or so it will just be me, Fiona and Yates, so we need to make the most the time we have left together. Let’s hope that Moscow is as friendly & inviting as St.Petersburg has been.... 

The Thick of It: World Cup 2018 Russia

The Thick of It: World Cup 2018 Russia

As anyone would know who has read my World Cup Blogs before or ever attended a World Cup Tournament as a fan of football, the group stages are a gruelling marathon of endless football games following on one after another, after another, until you almost can’t remember what you have seen, when you saw it or where... Well, we are back in the thick of it again, scheduling our time around matches we are attending, games we want to see on TV, and the

occasional meal or two, and personally, I love it... I don’t love the ever-increasing tiredness or the semi-arduous treks out to the stadiums, or the boring 1-nil games from teams that should do better, I love that, for 6 weeks in June & July every 4 years, I am encompassed in the buzz of it all and involved in an event being watched by more than half the population of the world. Obviously the time-off, the travel, and the immersion into a different country, culture & cuisine help fuel the passion, without the high drama that is World Cup football, you could find yourself asking yourself whether it was really worth the hassle....

Over the first week of the World Cup we have attended our first 2 matches at the Saint Petersburg

Stadium; the first a slightly laboured win for Iran over Morocco involving an own goal in the last minute of injury time; the second a magnificent 3-1 victory for the World cup Hosts Russia over Egypt on a cold, wet blustery evening where the only thing keeping us warm was the thrill of the game itself. In between those 2 matches, I have personally seen at least part of every other game except for the 2 games that were being played while we were in

transit to the Stadium, which by my calculation is at least 16 games on TV, so no one can question my dedication when it comes to the World Cup, right? Whilst Yates has been busy with friends & family, Fiona & I have spent some quality time together, between games obviously, and have tried to chill-out as much as possible around this gorgeous city of St.Petersburg.  Yates & I did manage one night of debauched drinking when we met a couple of Australians at a bar during the Germany v Mexico game, that became an endless round of vodka shots and verbal abuse, for which I paid handsomely in the hang-over stakes, but other than that it has been quite civilised.

As we enter week two of the tournament there is little relief in sight in the short term... We are off to watch Brazil v Costa Rica tomorrow to be followed by Argentina v Nigeria next Tuesday, and in between those matches we need to be in a position to watch both the England & Germany games and many others coming up over the same period. It’s always like this in the group stages, thank God that it slows down a touch once we get to the knock-out stages, by then we will have transferred to Moscow and have a whole lot of new sightseeing to fill in the gaps between games. 

Wish us luck....

Watch out Russia, Here We Come: World Cup 2018 Russia

Watch out Russia, Here We Come

The alarm woke us at 3:30am and within 30 minutes we were checked-out of our hotel and half-way across the road to the departure lounge ready to start the 1st leg of what would be a 24-hour journey to the Northern hemisphere. Check-in was smooth and efficient and before we knew it we were boarding the A380 aircraft and settling down for the 14-hour journey to Dubai. 

I love planes and flying, there is always a frisson of excitement and adventure whenever I get to do it and as far as I am concerned the longer the flight the better, although Fiona disagrees. This time I plugged in my noise canceling headphone, shut out the drone of the engines and the snoring of nearby passengers and managed to watch 5 movies and grab a few minutes of shut-eye before we arrived at our roasting-hot connection in Dubai. Our boarding time for St. Petersburg was less than 2 hours so by the time we had gone through security again and found the gate, we really only had just about enough time to check our  Facebook & Instagram before boarding started all over again. The half-empty flight to St. Petersburg was a leisurely 6 hours jump, (only 1 movie this time), Fiona got a whole row of seats to sleep in and I managed to get a couple of hours sleep before we were touching down in the Russian Federation for the first time ever. 

Everything went like clockwork again, straight through immigration with no issues at all and just a short wait outside the airport for a free shuttle to take us to our hotel for the evening. We were so tired and jet-lagged, our bodies felt like it was the middle of the night but it was only early evening, we only had time for a quick cup-of-tea before we both fell into a deep sleep for about 12 hours.

We awoke somewhat refreshed and had a leisurely breakfast before we got back on the shuttle to the airport where we would be meeting Yates off of his flight from Zurich. He arrived on time and was soon through immigration & customs, he found us easily in the terminal, and within an hour we were in an Uber heading into the heart of St. Petersburg. Everything had been going so well to this point....., what could possibly go go wrong..?

Firstly, I had the wrong address for our AirBnB apartment and got dropped off on a nearby street but just not the right one. Fully loaded up with all of our bags, (and remember Yates doesn’t do ‘travelling light’, he has as much baggage for himself as Fiona & I did between us), we wandered aimlessly up and down the street trying in vain to find the entrance to an apartment building that wasn’t there.  Phones out, Google maps open, checking email, once, twice, and the AirBnB app, and finally, I see my mistake and we have drag our increasingly heavy baggage around the block to the correct street and find the missing doorway.... Phew..., found it. We get to the 5th floor and knock on what I think is the right door, no answer.... I check again and see I am knocking on the wrong door, and start knocking on the right door,... still no answer...!! We pressed bells, knocked loudly, looked for keys under mats, still nothing. Phones out again, this time to call the hosts contact number, no answer.... 

For about 45 minutes we were sitting forlornly at the top of a stairway, the faint whiff of cat piss lingering in the air, wondering if we were going to have to sleep there for the night. Yates finally had enough and contacted AirBnB directly who told us to go to a local coffee shop for an hour while they chased the host down to get us into the apartment.  "Sod the coffee" I went straight for a beer while we waited around the corner in the quaintly named "Clean Plates Society" cafe, having stilted conversations with a CSR on a different continent, who finally managed to contact someone who could only speak Russian and then had to find someone to translate. By the time it was sorted out I was both struggling with my jet-lagged and slightly pissed mind as we made it into the apartment, only to find that the cleaner was there and would need 3 hours to prepare the place for us... Grrrrr..... Well, at least we could drop our bags off and head around the corner to a craft beer bar and enjoy a few more beers while we waited....  7 hours later than expected, we finally took up residence in our 5th-floor apartment in the historic centre of St. Petersburg.... It had been a very long and tiring day....

Now there is something I need to warn people about who may find themselves in St. Petersburg in early summer, the sun doesn’t set until around 10:30pm and even at that time, it is not what you would call ‘dark’. However, that’s not what I am warning you about, the warning is that the sun rises at about 3:30am, and when I say rises, it comes up like a rocket and is as bright as midday by 4:00am... We awoke the next morning to bright sunshine in a clear blue sky streaming through our curtain-less windows, (huh?), thinking it must be at least 10:00am only to find it was only 4:00am. Luckily we still had our eye masks from our recent flights which we hastily put on, but even so, it was hard to get back to sleep. Even now, a week later, it has been hard not to wake up ridiculously early, which was not helped by our massive jet lag.... Oh well, first world problems I suppose...

Since we arrived we have been finding our feet in St. Petersburg which is a remarkably beautiful and strikingly cosmopolitan city, the equal of London, Rome or Paris, with a cool vibe and a growing buzz of excitement around the start of the World Cup. Staying in the city over a week before our first live game has given us some time to first overcome the jet lag, but also to get our bearing and to see some of what this great city has to offer. If you like stunning imperial 18th century architecture, a palace on every corner, heaps of world-class museums and charming tree-lined streets leading to large open squares or parks, or stumbling across the occasion canal, then St. Petersburg is the place for you.  We have visited many of the recommended tourist sites, done a guided canal trip around the city, visited the world famous State Hermitage Museum, and found some great restaurants, (Russian, Indian, Irish, Georgian & Uzbek, American, so far), and a oddly large number of craft beer bars....

This has been over 3 years in the making to get to this point and we can’t wait for the World Cup to kick off tomorrow. We have a table booked at a favourite bar to watch the opening game between Russia & Saudi Arabia and on Friday we are off to see our first live game of this tournament, the ‘high voltage and potentially electrifying’ fixture between Iran and Morocco at the St. Petersburg Stadium. If you find yourself watching this game keep an eye out for us, we will be the only ones waving the New Zealand flag... 

Our Blue Mountain Hideaway: World Cup 2018 Russia

Our Blue Mountain Hideaway 

The final part of our Australian road trip odyssey was to travel back towards Sydney through the Blue Mountains National Park, staying for 2 nights in the very heart of the park in Katoomba. We have seen a lot of dusty outback on this trip and now it was time to head back towards the coast and see something a bit different. We knew that the scenery would change significantly but what we had overlooked was that it would also be a lot cooler in the mountains and as we got closer to our destination, both a light drizzle and the temperature started to fall.  We arrived at our campground in the half-light of late afternoon and did some much-needed laundry before heading to get a glimpse of the Blue Mountains before sunset. It was cold & wet but it was not disappointing....

The following morning was brighter than the previous evening, but still in single digits on the temperature scale when we awoke, and so we got up early to make the most of the day. Our campground was literally on the edge of the plateaux overlooking a series of deep canyons and the impressive Mount Solitary, and just around the corner from Scenic World, a sort of amusement park for nature-lovers, which is where we decided to head.

Scenic World has a couple of interesting attractions; firstly it has the steepest railway in the world, first built by coal miners in the late 1800’s; secondly it has an impressive cable car that swings out over the deep valley floor; and it has a cableway that descends the 270 metres down to the forest in the valley below. When you get down to the forest there are a bunch of elevated walkways you can take that wind through some very impressive and untouched scenery which has not changed since Jurassic times. Fiona & I had a heap of fun spending the morning riding down the

cableway, doing the forest walks below and then coming back up on the railway before shooting off to do the cable car over the Katoomba Falls. After lunch, we did it all again, but this time in the reverse order, going down the railway, (quite a different experience to coming up the railway, let me tell you), and back up the cableway , we even threw in a few more cheeky rides down the railway for good measure before calling it a day and heading back to the van for our last night.

The Blue Mountains area was awesome, and I think it would have been nice to be able to stay another night, but we had to pack up our stuff and clean up the van before driving into the heart of Sydney to return it. It was another overcast and damp morning when we awoke, but we had a cup of tea, used up the last of our breakfast cereal and dug out our backpacks and started the packing process. We were all set by 10:00am and had plenty of time before we need to start the trip to Sydney, so in good kiwi fashion, we stopped off in town for a second breakfast of pancakes,... Yum.

The Camper return location was not far from Sydney Airport, where we had a room booked at an airport hotel, in preparation for our 6am flight the next day. The drive into Sydney got progressively worse, both in terms of weather, it started raining hard, and the traffic was just mental. I guess if you swan about in a van in the outback, where you wave pleasantly to passing drivers because you just don’t see that many of them, driving into Sydney in the rain on a Tuesday morning in a 7m long camper van, things are going to feel a bit stressful, and don’t worry, they were....  The only time that I felt at risk throughout the whole of the 3,700kms that we drove was the last 15km in Sydney traffic, which is something I don’t wish to repeat in a hurry....  But we made it safe & sound, and regretfully handed back the keys to what had been our home for the past 2 weeks.

Overall the van had been very comfortable and was fully equipped with everything we could possibly want, and more. We found it quite spacious inside and we also enjoyed using the outside space, (with provided table & foldable chair), with enthusiastic use of the roll-away outside grill for almost all of our cooking. We are going to miss our rolling home, and I would most definitely recommend & encourage people to hire this sort of camper for any extended trips to Australia its a great way to see the country, (skip rainy days in Sydney), and I feel certain that this will not be the last time we do this. It is expensive, but you get what you pay for.

We checked-in to our airport hotel, (literally 3 minutes walk from Departures), used up the last of Australian cash in the hotel sports bar, and hunkered down for an early night, as we had to be up at around 3:00-4:00am to make our flight for the next part of our Adventure.... Russia, here we come...

Heading East : World Cup 2018 Russia

Heading East : World Cup 2018 Russia

As we had spent quite a bit of time in Uluru, Coober Pedy & Port Augusta, and we wanted to have a couple of nights in the Blue Mountains before hitting Sydney and the airport, we now has a few days where we needed to get some distance under our belt. Instead of heading further south to Adelaide, Melbourne and back up to Sydney, we wanted to continue our flirtation with the dusty desert and had planned a route heading almost due east from Port Augusta, skirting along the edge of the boarder of civilization and the vast empty outback for a few more days.  

Our first target overnight stop was in a historic mining town called Broken Hill some 400kms east of Port Augusta, so we packed up early, well early for us, and hit the road. Leaving town we passed many farms and orchards lining the road as we crossed over the foothills of the Flinders Ranges and beyond. Soon though the neatly arranged crops and fields gave way to dusty scrublands and the all-too-familiar red earth that we had been seeing ever since we set off from Alice Springs, and it wasn’t long before we felt like we were back in the outback. Long days at the wheel can be fun regardless of how repetitive they may seem, and Fiona & I enjoyed the ever-moving scenery, accompanied by a rotating selection of our favourite podcasts, (Judge John Hodgman & ‘My Dad Wrote a Porno), interspaced with long talks about life, the universe, and everything.

We arrive into Broken Hill in the mid-afternoon and found somewhere for a late lunch before heading to my favoured campground to see if we could get a spot for the night, and even though they were extremely busy, we managed to get a powered site for the night and settle in. I can honestly say that even though this small mining town on the frontier between the working farmlands of the coastal hinterland and the barren wastes of the outback, may have seemed a bit quiet, it had a lot going for it, and this was going to be one of the many places we had visited that I wish we could have spent longer in. We had seen that there was a desert sculpture park on the outskirts of the city and we resolved to rise early, leave the campground and visit the park on our way out of town, and have breakfast on the road. We managed to rise early and get on the road, but we had not factored in that the warmth of the sun had yet to kick in as we stood on a breezy hilltop looking at both the sculpture and the impressive vistas, demonstrably freezing our arses off. Even the local Kangaroo population were too cold to hop away from us, so apart from our new marsupial friends we spent an enjoyable 20 minutes alone before we retreated to the van to warm up.

We had a lot of ground to cover to get to Cobar some 460kms further west and we settled in for another 5 hours drive, but at least we have a cooked breakfast of a bacon & egg sandwich to look forward to at our first stop of the day. The kilometres seemed to pass effortlessly in our unstoppable Mercedes Sprinter camper, which considering its limited space was surprisingly comfortable and enjoyable to spend time in, and it was as reliable as we have come to expect of superior German engineering. It was another afternoon of finding a campsite and then making ourselves at home for the evening. We really didn’t see much of Cobar which is a bit of a shame, but you never know when we might come back this way. We made the most of an early start and finally started heading back to some semblance of civilisation, towards the city metropolis of Dubbo via the interestingly named Boganshire...! I honestly thought that the word ‘Bogan’ was a derogatory name that others used to label Australians, but it seems to be an actual place,... Who knew..?

The ride to Dubbo was a shorter one so we had some time to spend an afternoon in the city of only 39,000 people, with the campground was just a short walk to the centre of the city and was as comfortable and relaxed as any of the places we had stayed in before, except this time with actual green grass.  We found a small Vietnamese restaurant for a spot of lunch and spent the rest of the afternoon exploring the Old Gaol complex which was remarkably well preserved, not surprising as it was in use until 1966...! We took a slow saunter back to the van, before planning for our last few nights in the campervan and our trip to the Blue Mountains.

Reaching the Ocean, almost....

Reaching the Ocean, almost.... : World Cup 2018 Russia

When you are on the Stuart Highway heading south, after Coober Pedy there is little opportunity to head anywhere other than towards Port Augusta, a small town situated on the very northern end of the Spencer Gulf, that eventually leads out to the Great Australian Bight, or as close as damn it, the Southern Ocean.  It was another 500km plus driving day to get us down to Port Augusta so we booked into the campsite for 2 nights so that we could have a rest day and explore the area.

The trip was another 5 hours of ever-changing scenery, from the long dusty plains out of Coober Pedy, through the wild outback desert, past the vast inland salt lakes and the Woomera test range, a facility that supported the British nuclear bomb testing in the 1950’s. Eventually, as we descended a number of great escarpments we arrived on an arid coastal plain of marshes and swamps at the head of the Spencer Gulf. It had been a long day at the wheel so we pitched up at a nice looking campground and settled in for the night.

With no great plans for the day, we ate a leisurely breakfast and headed into Port Augusta, on what was a warm and pleasant day. We found a good spot to park ‘Dilbert’, (no mean feat with a 7m/21 foot van) and took a wander around the small town. It had once been a great port with massive docks and several jetties but with the arrival of the train and motor car, and a bigger port further south towards Adelaide, Port Augusta was now a sleepy little town on the water’s edge.  

We had a very enjoyable couple of hours following the heritage trail, reading up on the history and sitting on the old wharf before heading to the Australian Arid Lands Botanic Garden for a spot of lunch, which came highly recommended. After eating we sat in the gardens enjoying the warmth of the pale winter sun and then went to the overlook to view the distant Flinders Ranges, thinking that very little had probably changed to the view since Mathew Flinders sailed up the Spence Gulf just over 200 years ago.

We jumped back in ‘Dilbert’ and went on a short adventure into the Flinders Range to a small town called Quorn, which looked like just what you would expect an Australian country town to look like from the 1800’s. We took a look at a small railway museum and then around the old buildings scattered about this small town before going into a typically Australian county hotel bar for a drink and a chat with the barman. 

He was a font of information about the town, in particular, all the films that had been made in the area, and in fact filming was about to start in the next few days for another of those Australian country drama’s that seem to pop up on NZ TV so often. We meandered our way back through the hills to Port Augusta and settled in for the evening, as we were going to have an early start the following morning as we turned East and headed towards Sydney over the next week....

Welcome to Coober Pedy

Welcome to Coober Pedy: World Cup 2018

Coober Pedy looks exactly like what it is, a dusty frontier mining town sitting in the middle of a desert plain and while this is the largest settlement for almost 1,000 kilometres, it just looks barren & empty. We cruised into town and found the campsite we were going to stay at and checked in for 2 nights, quickly setting up camp in a now well-practiced fashion. 

It was late Sunday afternoon, and that evening the campground had a 2-for-1 deal on Sunday Roasts in their restaurant and Fiona & I were not going to miss out on the chance on that tasty deal. Fiona went to the bottle shop and scored a six-pack and we enjoyed the rest of the warm sunny afternoon at camp before we took advantage of the offer of a roast dinner. Like with any form of camping, once the sun goes down, there isn’t a whole else you can do except for heading to a bar, but we were not in that kind of mood, so we took advantage of another early night.

The previous evening we had signed up for an afternoon tour of Coober Pedy, so we lazed around during the morning, taking a long walk along a short main street, and ended up having a coffee at a petrol station. We duly went to wait for our tour in reception, where we met a former Greek émigré Dmitri, now known as Jimmy, a dapper small framed man would be our tour guide for the afternoon. Even though Jimmy had been in Australia for the thick end of 55 years, he still maintained a thick southern European accent that was on occasion difficult to decipher. Anyway, we jumped in his mini-bus with a bunch of other guests and set out on a tour of the highlights of the town and some of the surrounding area.

I can honestly say that I can’t remember going on such a fascinating tour with such an interesting guide. We started out at the underground Serbian church which was hewn out of the local sandstone and gypsum by local miners, complete with hand-carved statues by a famous Kiwi sculptor, and even on this warm late autumn afternoon, it was refreshing to slip underground where the temperature hovers between 22-25’C year round. Jimmy joked around that he sometimes stood in for the priest, and that he was good friends with the sculptor, he certainly knew his local history. 

Apparently, Coober Pedy is famous for its underground homes, which would explain why it seemed that there were not many houses around, but if you looked closely, you could just pick out the ventilation shafts dotted around the rocky landscape, giving away the position of another hidden home. The temperatures in this place reach a staggering 50’C in the heat of summer, and therefore living underground has almost become a necessity, and given that the majority of people that live in Coober Pedy are involved in the opal mining business, it makes sense that they use those skills to build their homes.

We took a trip to a former opal mine firstly to view how the underground houses were laid out, and then further down to see how the mining was performed. Jimmy told us that this was once one of his mines and showed us where he and his brother used to dig, and where they found the opal. He was certainly a bit of a character, but I wasn’t sure whether this was part of his tour guide routine or for real, but everyone we met as we wandered the mining exhibition knew him on first name terms, or as ‘Jimmy-the Runner’. It seems that he had a reputation for both setting short fuses and getting clear quickly when blowing a mine, and also for being a charity marathon runner, I’m not sure which one was true. At this point, I started to get an inkling that Jimmy was some sort of local legend especially when I saw his photo in a book at the gift shop, whoever he was he was a character.

We next drove out of town into the mine working where we saw hundreds if not thousands of deep mineshafts which have been sunk on speculation to find the elusive opal. Opal is formed from silica-laden water seeping into cracks in the sandstone, or into the voids left by dead animals or shells, like how fossils are formed, and solidifying into the opaque precious stones we know today. As this process is dependent upon where cracks form and how and where sea creatures die and get trapped in sediment, there is literally no way of being able to know exactly where opal might form, so each of the many hundreds of thousands of mineshafts sunk out there was a lottery, and if you found opal, you were extremely lucky. Jimmy showed us a few of his old mines and told us old stories of friends that had died in cave-ins or falls, or a very few that had survived but moved away from mining. Jimmy had had a recent battle with cancer and since beating that terrible disease had given up the mining for being a tour guide. Both Fiona & I thought that given half a chance he would be back down a mineshaft quicker than you could say “Crikey”...!

From the mining area, we went out into the desert area to see the famous Dingo-Proof Fence, which stretches over 5,600km from South Australia to New South Wells, an unbelievable feat of engineering which is still kept up today. Then we went to the Plains of the Moon to watch the sun set over what was the bottom of an ancient seabed many millions of millions of years ago, strewn with foreign rocks transported by a long-vanished glacier. It was a stunning vista of golden reds and flaming oranges as we watch the sun finally dipped beneath the horizon, accompanied by wine and nibbles, all very refined and dandy. From here we headed back into town in the dying light to end the tour at the Desert Cave Hotel for a drink and a wander through their underground museum. Overall the tour was a great way to spend an afternoon in this strangely odd but alluring town of Coober Pedy, and I recommend it to anyone that comes this way through Australia. Un-missable.

We wandered back to our campground to make our dinner, drink another beer and reflect on what had been a great day, one that we would not forget anytime soon.