Leaving Adelaide

I finally did it! On the morning of Saturday the 1st July I left Adelaide to continue my travels. The first leg of my journey was to be a two day trip up through South Australia and into the Northern Territory to reach Alice Springs. I set off as part of a tour of around 18 people. The majority of the time was spent on the bus with a few stops at roadhouses along the way.

We spent Saturday night in a strange little town in the middle of nowhere called Coober Pedy. Coober Pedy exists for only one reason. Opal. There's a shedload of it under the ground, and the town, with a population of around 3500, is obsessed with the stuff.

When I heard about the place I assumed that the town would be pretty much owned and run by one or two big mining companies. In actual fact I was way off. Basically, the people of Coober Pedy have kept the big companies out of the town since it was built. People in the town mine for themselves. All you have to do is pay a few bucks for a permit and you get given 4 pegs to peg out either a 50m x 50m or 100m x 50m square/rectangle of land. That land is then your "claim" where you can mine for as long as you want provided you mine for a minimum amount of time each week. If you find opal you'll make a decent amount of money. If you don't you waste a decent amount of money.

More about opal and mining can be found at:

http://www.cooberpedy.sa.gov.au/site/page.cfm?u=202#e132

Anyway, it was Saturday evening in Coober Pedy and everyone on my bus went out for a few drinks at a local bar. After a few dinks there most people retired to the hostel but a few of us wanted to watch the England vs Portugal match and so set off up the road for a hotel which we'd been told would be screening the game. As we arrived there we found the hotel owners closing up. They said they were too quiet to stay open but they were heading to a social club along a badly lit road and the match might be on there. So we headed off to try and find this social club. We got there just before kick-off.

It was a strange, strange place. It seemed that if you wanted a drink after midnight in Coober Pedy this was the only place to be. This meant that the 20-30 people inside there were of all ages. The old blokes wanting a pint were there, as were the young people wanting a Saturday night out, as were the middle aged women wanting a gossip. Hell, there were people in the corner playing table tennis. I was the only person from my bus to stay and watch the whole game, although I shouldn't have bothered. The club actually shut about 20 minutes before the penalties were over but the kind lady that was closing up allowed me and a couple of old guys to stay to the end.

The old guys clearly didn't have a clue about football. They seemed to think that the game had been entertaining to watch. It was when they claimed that penalties was no way to settle an important match like a quarter final that I felt the need to interject. I know a lot has been made about this point, especially after what happened in the final, but after watching two hours of an uncharacteristically uncreative Portugal and a characteristically mediocre England I was glad of the short but sweet excitement of penalties. They should've scrapped the match and had the penalty shoot out instead. The match took up two hours of my life that I'll never get back.

Anyway, with England out I could return to my hostel, blatantly ignoring the "Don't walk around Coober Pedy at night by yourself" advice our driver Richard had given us all earlier.

So I got back to the hostel and got about three hours of sleep before I had to get up for a mine tour. We were shown a mine, told about how it all works and were told about how easy it is to buy explosives in town. You get them at the local supermarket as if you were buying cigarettes. Obviously I felt tempted to pick some up as a souvenir but the supermarket wouldn't open until after we were back on the road. Shame.

Oh yeah, the hostel was underground. My room was part of one big corridor tunnelled into the side of a rocky hill. It was well cool!