Coober Pedy

We left Kings Creek Station Tuesday morning 7th Sept.  It was tempting to stay longer, being such a pleasant place to stay in the out back.  Generous sites, and things to do, or not as we felt.  However we decided to move on, after a walk around the camping area, and a look at the camels.  We found out that it was a working camel station, where presumably they catch camels and also breed some - there were a couple of young ones in the yard.  They are recently received an order for 2000 camels to be shipped somewhere(?).

The weather was cloudy and we could see storms in the distance as we drove south and east towards Erldunda on the Stuart Hightway.  We ate some lunch there, after buying a bit of junk food from the roadhouse (not our usual practice).  We were running down on fresh supplies in order not to take any into South Aust, as that is the requirement in case of fruit fly and other problems.  We drove on the Kulgera about 20ks from the border and stopped there, rather early, on a bleak and windy rainy afternoon.

Wednesday we continued driving south, and into South Australia.  There are no towns, just rest areas and several roadhouses on the road.  We made good time and continued on to Coober Pedy, the only town before Port Augusta.  So we are staying here for 2 days, 3 nights.  It's been good to rest from driving too far.  We took the town tour offered from this caravan park on Wednesday morning and received information and sites around town, hearing about mining, seeing an underground church, the golf course, mining areas, noodling area (where we can look in the mullock heaps for opal) and a museum/old mine and (of course) opal shop.  We ate out at a local Pizza Restaurant, which was very popular.  We were warned in the late afternoon at the caravan park that we could expect 90 k hour winds, with a change coming through.  It was raining heavily several times in the late afternoon, evening.  However the wind did not get to the predicted level, and we slept well, and everything stayed intact.

Underground Catacombe Anglican Church

Old mining winch

We drove ourselves around in the afternoon to see more for ourselves, and this time looked at a couple of other underground churches - the Anglican 'Catacomb' church, the Revival Church.  (Today we saw inside the Catholic church too). 

This morning we've walked the length of the main street and looked at opals and art, found a place to have coffee, and also been to the information centre to use the internet access, to manage some of our emails.  The emails were rather clogged and not responding on our computer, in spite of the fact that we do get the Optus connection here.  We've listed to do another tour at 4 this afternoon to see the Breakaways, outside town.