Coober and Kostas

Sunday, August 02, 2015
Coober Pedy, South Australia, Australia
Day 14 – Coober and Kostas

Today we left Marla for points South . If I thought some of the country we’d been through was boring, well, this part of the drive surpassed it! The desert is more of a
gibber plain here with rock armour on the surface rather than the red sands of
the heart. In some areas there are hardly any bushes to break up the landscape and I swear I could make out the curvature of the Earth!

We stopped at Cadney homestead for coffee “only instant sir” well a pot of tea then “self serve with tea bags”, oh, ok then…said we to the nice Estonian girl who was very polite but very direct and succinct. The homestead is about as “in the middle of nowhere” as anywhere we’d visited. One of the signs leading up to it said “stop for a cuppa so we both don’t starve!”
– I believe them!

We parked in the restaurant section of the homestead, which Graeme thought may have been a former “Wayside Inn”. The walls were decorated with a variety of paraphernalia, from old saddles to saws, a ubiquitous photo of R .M. Williams and the like…interspersed with gaming machines and a pool table. In the centre of the room sat a large circular fireplace with a box of firewood. 
 
G spotted an old paper in the box, presumably used to get the fire going, so of course he pulled it out and read it, out of date and missing pages, while we had our tea!

We arrive at Coober Pedy around noon, refuelled the car and ourselves and went looking for the visitors centre and attractions. I was determined to get underground somewhere
and perhaps buy someone some opal. We wandered into a shop which was pretty much in the dark. The owner had all the lights turned off, presumably to save power. Anyway Kostas
the Greek opal dealer turned out to be an engaging character “…here for forty tree yeeers”, he exuded cheerfully and after he had lightened my wallet by a not insubstantial sum, we wandered off and found the Umoona Museum. Umoona, by fitting both the categories of a)
interesting and b) underground, ensured that we wandered through!  It was lovely and cool inside, we were told it was 31 outside and it felt like 20 inside .

Umoona is very well implemented and has won several awards. There are displays about the aboriginal culture of the area, information about fossils and of course the opal mining history. 
A cinema there was not operating and we didn’t have a lot of time so we didn’t ask to see the show but I’m sure it wouldn’t have been a problem.

We climbed up on the mound of earth or spoil that covers the museum which offered something of a lookout over town. In the adjoining yard there was something that looked like a spaceship! Graeme thought it may have been a hovercraft in a previous life but later we figured it was from a film set or something as it was too much like something out of a
movie! Possibly a failed tourist attraction?

We trundled on, headed for Glendambo for the night, in order to reach Broken Hill around lunchtime the next day. Our gentle nor’wester turned into a gentle and then not so gentle sou’wester as a front came through . The girl at the Coober Pedy visitor information centre told us it was 31 degrees but that “tomorrow will be 17!”  I’m trusting that the gusts will
ease off over night!

The water here is very hard, we were warned not to drink it or even boil it to drink! It tasted
salty in the shower. Fortunately, we still have plenty in the underbody tank, a 15 litre bottle onboard and a 20 litre jerrycan as well.

Graeme, as he is won’t to do, finished some leftovers for tea while I did some file rearranging on my tablet, content with some nice crackers and cheese when we arrived and set up - this touring is such hard work!

We settled down with GG a tad concerned that he might have nightmares about being on a ship at sea in a hurricane given the way the van was rocking around!
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