What can we say about Coober Pedy? Um, kinda different? Chock full of interesting characters? Frontier land? A good place to take the time to clean all the dust out of the van and find a hardware store so we could make some minor repairs to the van?
Firstly, Coober Pedy is not a pretty place (although, from a previous post, you’ll see it is surrounded by natural desert beauty). It’s an opal mining town first and foremost, and the evidence is everywhere – slag heaps, as well as touristy mines and opal shops.
And it gets hot here in summer (often in the 40s Celsius), which is why many of the homes, businesses, hotels and churches here are underground.
We visited the Serbian Orthodox Church, a wonderful example of an underground facility.
Another fascinating place was Faye’s Underground House. Faye was a colourful Coober Pedy identity, who (with her two female friends) hand-dug this underground home over a ten-year period beginning in the early 1960s.
Even the Comfort Inn is underground.
We also visited the wonderful volunteer-driven RSL Club, which only operates on Sunday afternoons/evenings.
Gotta love the drive-in that still operates here, and the reminder to keep your explosives at home!
The pool at our caravan park was indoors – inside an old water tank!
And Coober Pedy has a lot of quirky ‘stuff’!
Coober Pedy. Been there, done that!