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| Coober Pedy to Alice Springs |
zaterdag 3 november 2007
Photos Outback Adventure
Please click on the link below and then click on the 'diavoorstelling' button, just above the photo labelled 'DAY 1: Coober Pedy...'
Coober Pedy to Alice Springs - 25-31 October
After 3 rather boring days in Adelaide, we hopped on the Greyhound bus to Coober Pedy on Wednesday 24 October at 18:00. It’s amazing how your concept of time changes as you are travelling. You get so used to waiting or doing very little, that a 12 hour busride passes quickly and you arrive on your place of destination before you know it. So after a bit of reading, watching a film, a dinner stop and a couple of hours of sleep, I woke up at 5:30 when the busdriver announced we would be in Coober Pedy in 5 minutes.
So there we were at the Coober Pedy busstation, at 5:40 in the morning, when it was just getting light. We were greeted by a friendly man that was responsible for running the busstation and distributing the freight that came in with the buses. He kindly allowed us to store our bags in the station, whilst he went to the post office to drop off a couple of parcels and directed us to the Coober Pedy bakery, the only place in town that was already open. After coffee, tea and breakfast he dropped us off with his postvan at the Umooja opal museum, where we were supposed to meet our tour group at around noon. The owner of the museum, who also ran a couple of backpackers’ dorm caves kindly offered us a couple of hours of sleep in one of the bunks. So after 2 hours of sleep and a quick tour of the town, we met our tour group at noon. After lunch, we did a tour of the opal mine and underground houses, which was very interesting. The majority of people in Coober Pedy live in underground homes, which are a consistent temparature of 20-25 Celsius, compared to the temperatures outside that range between 0-50 Celsius. All you need to do a purchase a piece of land – after that you can excavate the house that you want. This can either be done by hand – a cheap but timeconsuming option (about 2 months for 1 room) - or automatically (about 1 day for 1 room at $1000 per day). Any opal that is found in the process of creating your house is yours, which means people keep on expanding and expanding their home once opal is found. As a result, the biggest underground house in Coober Pedy counts 44 rooms but accomodates only 1 person. Some people even take it a step further. When they find opal, they start illegially digging underneath their neighbours, and occasionally end up breaking through their neighbours’ wall.
After the tour, we headed to our first outback camp at Mount Barry. I won’t go into massive detail about everything we saw and did on a daily basis, but will let the photos speak for themselves. However, here’s a general impression of what a day of our tour looked like. We would wake up anywhere between 4am and 6:30am (travelling can be really tiring) to breakfast with bread toasted on the campfire. After clearing away all our gear, we would head to the next spot for a morning walk. Our vehicle consisted of a Toyota Landcruiser with 3 people squeezed in the front and another 7 in the back – all pretty cosy, especially considering we had 2 very big guys on our tour. The battered trailer behind the vehicle carried all the luggage, including cooking equipment, food for a couple of days, water for 10 people for a couple of days, all our bags and sleeping bags. After the morning walk, we’d do a couple of hours more driving or have lunch straight away (freshly made salad and sandwiches) followed by some more driving and sometimes a swim in a waterhole, or when available, a swimming pool. We would usually arrive at our next camp at 6pm, when everyone would start the required tasks to set up camp and prepare dinner before sunset. After dinner, we would sit around the campfire for a while, before retiring to our swags, big canvas sleeping bags with a matras in them. Sleeping under the stars in the middle of nowhere was really an amazing experience and something we won’t forget easily. We first night we were both rather cold towards the morning, but once we figured out how to put the swags together so we could connect our sleeping bags, we were able to keep each other warm.
Because we were camping in the middle of nowhere every night, there were no toilets, which meant peeing in the wild. We also had a special shovel to dig a hole and cover it up in case you needed to go for ‘a big one’, as Eric, our French group member called it. Because of the lack of showers and the enormous amount of dust generated by driving on unpaved road, our clothes, bodies and bags all had a red glare after less than 2 days and our hair felt like rope. This ‘outback look’ was particularly apparent when confronted with the tourists that travelled in airconditioned buses and stayed in hotels at some of the more touristy attractions. This tour has definitely been one of the highlights of our trip until so far and an experience to remember!
So there we were at the Coober Pedy busstation, at 5:40 in the morning, when it was just getting light. We were greeted by a friendly man that was responsible for running the busstation and distributing the freight that came in with the buses. He kindly allowed us to store our bags in the station, whilst he went to the post office to drop off a couple of parcels and directed us to the Coober Pedy bakery, the only place in town that was already open. After coffee, tea and breakfast he dropped us off with his postvan at the Umooja opal museum, where we were supposed to meet our tour group at around noon. The owner of the museum, who also ran a couple of backpackers’ dorm caves kindly offered us a couple of hours of sleep in one of the bunks. So after 2 hours of sleep and a quick tour of the town, we met our tour group at noon. After lunch, we did a tour of the opal mine and underground houses, which was very interesting. The majority of people in Coober Pedy live in underground homes, which are a consistent temparature of 20-25 Celsius, compared to the temperatures outside that range between 0-50 Celsius. All you need to do a purchase a piece of land – after that you can excavate the house that you want. This can either be done by hand – a cheap but timeconsuming option (about 2 months for 1 room) - or automatically (about 1 day for 1 room at $1000 per day). Any opal that is found in the process of creating your house is yours, which means people keep on expanding and expanding their home once opal is found. As a result, the biggest underground house in Coober Pedy counts 44 rooms but accomodates only 1 person. Some people even take it a step further. When they find opal, they start illegially digging underneath their neighbours, and occasionally end up breaking through their neighbours’ wall.
After the tour, we headed to our first outback camp at Mount Barry. I won’t go into massive detail about everything we saw and did on a daily basis, but will let the photos speak for themselves. However, here’s a general impression of what a day of our tour looked like. We would wake up anywhere between 4am and 6:30am (travelling can be really tiring) to breakfast with bread toasted on the campfire. After clearing away all our gear, we would head to the next spot for a morning walk. Our vehicle consisted of a Toyota Landcruiser with 3 people squeezed in the front and another 7 in the back – all pretty cosy, especially considering we had 2 very big guys on our tour. The battered trailer behind the vehicle carried all the luggage, including cooking equipment, food for a couple of days, water for 10 people for a couple of days, all our bags and sleeping bags. After the morning walk, we’d do a couple of hours more driving or have lunch straight away (freshly made salad and sandwiches) followed by some more driving and sometimes a swim in a waterhole, or when available, a swimming pool. We would usually arrive at our next camp at 6pm, when everyone would start the required tasks to set up camp and prepare dinner before sunset. After dinner, we would sit around the campfire for a while, before retiring to our swags, big canvas sleeping bags with a matras in them. Sleeping under the stars in the middle of nowhere was really an amazing experience and something we won’t forget easily. We first night we were both rather cold towards the morning, but once we figured out how to put the swags together so we could connect our sleeping bags, we were able to keep each other warm.
Because we were camping in the middle of nowhere every night, there were no toilets, which meant peeing in the wild. We also had a special shovel to dig a hole and cover it up in case you needed to go for ‘a big one’, as Eric, our French group member called it. Because of the lack of showers and the enormous amount of dust generated by driving on unpaved road, our clothes, bodies and bags all had a red glare after less than 2 days and our hair felt like rope. This ‘outback look’ was particularly apparent when confronted with the tourists that travelled in airconditioned buses and stayed in hotels at some of the more touristy attractions. This tour has definitely been one of the highlights of our trip until so far and an experience to remember!
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