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.
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