Day 19 – September 19 2012

The minibus tour left at 8.20am so we were up bright & early & I wrote up yesterday’s blog before breakfast.  We met Rudi, our 77 year old tour guide & opal miner of 37 years & headed off on an informative & interesting morning.  Rudi drove us all over Coober Pedy with the first interesting stop the underground Serbian Orthodox Church, St Elijah.  This church is dug out of sandstone & is totally inside a small hill.  The temperature inside is a very pleasant 24C constantly when outside it can be unbearably hot.  The sandstone walls are beautifully multi coloured & finished with a clear spray that not only enhances the colour, but binds the outer sandstone to stop it crumbling.  There are also some beautiful carvings of the natural sandstone above the altar.  There are also public access mullock heaps in town that anyone can try their hand at noodling for opal that Rudi stopped at for a short while.  Some people are successful with this & can find some overlooked precious stone.

After seeing nearly everything in town we stopped off at an old opal mine that had been converted into a museum, showing both the past & present examples of both working & living underground.  With modern machinery the new underground homes can be very large, spacious & comfortable, as opposed to in the past being dug by hand with a pick axe.  Rudi was an excellent tour guide.

After lunch we were guided out to an old mine site by local historians, Brian & Judy.  Brian is an opal miner & a mine rescue volunteer.  This mine site, around 12 km of driving along a maze of dirt tracks, was where Helen’s mother (our friend travelling with us) was killed in an opal mine cave-in with her mining partner 37 years ago.  This was the first time Helen had visited the mine site where her mother died & it was very emotional.  Rose & I knew Mrs Huber when we were young so it was very touching for us to be there to say good bye to her.  We spent a little time there before Brian guided us out of the maze of mullock heaps & deep mine shafts.

These mine shafts are open & everywhere, as the miners are not allowed to fill them in.  There are thousands & thousands of unmarked holes, most around a metre across & 28 metres deep.  Lots of people have died after accidentally falling into these open holes.  Brian & Judy guided us back to their house where Helen was interviewed & taped to record some more of the unknown history of Coober Pedy.  We had a very nice afternoon tea under the veranda watching lots of zebra finches feeding the young in their nests under the veranda.  Afterwards Brian & Judy showed us through their very nice underground home.  It is unbelievable how cool it is compared to the 36.5C it was outside.  They were very kind lovely people, we all felt like they were old friends. We finished chatting & headed off before dark so that we would find our way back to camp.

We all decided to stroll down the main street in a lovely cool breeze not even realising that it was 31C.  We bought a few groceries, cooked our meal & said good night.  We left the windows & vents open when we left this morning because it was so warm. The inside of our caravan has never got so dusty as it did from the wind today (Coober Pedy is very dusty), even though we have travelled on many atrociously dusty roads.