Coober Pedy is strange. First of, sleeping underground here has it's
mayor pros. You save a lot of energy on air conditioning, then again
have to make up for that with ventilation. You have no clue what time
it is down there, due to not seeing the sun or any other object for
reference. Due to that I woke up at 9.30 o'clock, well rested and not
sweating in the heat up on the surface. After some breakfast I got
all my photos of the Oodnadatta Track sorted, updated the blog and
rendered one time lapse I had made on the way. Finishing that I had a
chat with a local doing some electrics in the caves and due to there
being tons of opals all over the place he confirmed that we might be
standing right next to half a million dollars or something along that
line. Could be just rocks, too. He had been digging for a few years,
but not amassed a huge fortune.
Then I went around
exploring the town. Lots of aboriginal people walking around the
place, but I was told that that is more normal here in the Outback
than on the coast. I ended up in the Old Timers Mine, a museum of how
opal mining used to be. I had a very interesting chat with the owner
and we had a very in depth talk of how opals are made, where they
find them, how they were mined, etc. She told of some people who have
mined out here for twenty years and never found a thing and then you
have someone who just wanted to add on a pantry to their house and
found loads of the stuff. Apparently one guy ended up digging 21
extra rooms because he was so lucky to find a hotspot of opals and
found a vein of them in every room. The most expensive opal they had
in the shop of the museum was priced at 28.000$.
After that I went to a
scenic outlook over the town and then back to the backpackers hostel
to do some computer work and lunch. Back there I met two guys from
Germany (they seem to be everywhere here) who are biking from Port
Augusta to Darwin on a tandem lay-down bike. If the wind so permits
they also have a kite to pull them. They are documenting their
journey carefully and want to maybe get in to the EFT (European Film
Tour) with their film they are going to make. If I met them on the
way again, I might do a short film for them, so both are in the scene
biking and not always just one. Till now they have had problems with
the kite thought, as the wind has always been coming the wrong way
(Headwind for bikers. Nasty thing, that). Shortly after a massive
storm pulled over Coober in the evening, even the owner was out with
his phone taking pictures and commenting on how rare rain is out
here. He talked about how the miners will not be happy about it, as
it will possibly flood some mines, but we have not to worry, he fixed
up all the holes in the dorms years ago (I would hope). After
witnessing the storm and saying a “see you later” to Julius and
Andi I went of to bed to catch some sleep for the drive the next day.
Julius and Andi have
got a website at “www.outbackcrosskiter.de”.
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