9th Feb 09 – Coober Pedy and the Stuart Highway

Day 3 of the trip presented us with our first seriously long drive. We were packed up and out of Quorn by daybreak. Half an hour later we passed through Port Augusta, notable as the place where two very very long roads branch out in opposite directions. One of these is the Eyre Highway, spreading across the Nullarbor Plain into Western Australia. The other is the Stuart Highway; not so much a road as a heroic feat of civil engineering that stretches all the way up through the central deserts to Darwin on the north coast. In between the two roads lie millions of square kilometres of nothing. Bugger all. Truly this was the crossroads of Australia.

And so we began our odyssey up the Stuart Highway. The road was named after John McDouall Stuart, an intrepid Victorian explorer who was the first to cross Australia from south to north. He was a key figure in the development of this route and spent half his life exploring the great bugger all (as it is known) and naming ranges of hills after him and his mates. Alongside the highway runs the Ghan, a long-distance train that puffs arthritically through the desert, pulling up to two kilometres of freight wagons behind it.

As we travelled, the immense empty landscape was bathed in rays of morning sun. Our guide Nick drew our attention to the Ghan – a vast, slow-moving metal snake passing us the other way. He kept himself awake with beef jerky and a wide array of other snack foods on the long drive while the rest of us dozed in the back and played games. There was quite a lot of vegetation around the road as there had been recent rainfall. The steady showers – no more than a couple of days of rain – equated to two years’ annual rainfall for this region.

We stopped at the tiny settlement of Pimba to buy supplies and refuel the bus. Nick asked us all to exit the bus when he put petrol in it, due to some safety requirement or other. I guess heat plus petrol can have nasty consequences. After a few hours cooped up inside we’d be mad not to want to stretch our legs anyway.

The fuel station was called Spud’s Roadhouse, and featured a restaurant, motel and pub. All the basic needs of humanity, grub, bed and booze, rolled into one at this remote outpost. The shop sold car stickers declaring “Where the bloody hell is Pimba, South Australia?” Wherever it was, we were there, happily acknowledging its existence.

After another spell on the highway, a giant sea of white loomed into view far on our left. We were entering an area of natural salt lakes, left over from a giant inland sea that dried up in prehistoric times (according to the boffins and such). We spent an hour sightseeing on Lake Hart, walking across the rough gravelly salt, marvelling in the beautiful crystalline light that surrounded everything for miles around. It was a bloody huge salt lake, measuring maybe twenty miles in length.

Then there were the trick photos. Being perfectly white, the salt lake gives no impression of distance, so you can walk far off from the camera, pose in line with your mate who’s in the foreground, and it looks like you’re a little pixie standing on their shoulder (or booting them playfully in the head if you move your legs). We spent ages setting up these photos for each other; posing, positioning, gesturing to the far-away people to move a little bit this way, a little bit that way. Good times. Only when you’re on holiday can you truly f**k around like this.

After the wonderment of the salt lake, Nick brought us back down to earth with some grim facts about the area. The British used the desert in South Australia for nuclear tests back in the 1950s. The bombs killed thousands of Aborigines dwelling in the bush and left a wide swathe of land contaminated with radiation. The military chose this spot as it was among the most isolated in the world, but were totally ignorant about the damage it would have on the environment and people.

Nick also told us Aborigines were still classed as ‘flora and fauna’ by law until 1968, and didn’t even acquire the legal status of humans till then. I found this amazing. The brutalities the colony was first built upon are far from a thing of the past. He wasn’t pulling any punches in giving us the secret history of the land. We were passing through a stretch of the Stuart Highway where the radiation levels are still so high you’re not permitted to go off the side of the road.

Safely through the fallout zone, we took a rest stop in Glendambo, billed as having a population of 30. This sparse pit stop was like a scene out of Crocodile Dundee; a single street, clouds of dust, and one of those big metal windmills on a giant stalk. Obviously there was a pub too.

We did all the usual toilet/shop/walk around gubbins, then there was a comedy 'old lady moment' as we pulled out on to the highway. Esther suddenly declared she’d left her wallet behind, so Nick turned the bus round and headed back to the fuel stop, only for her to find it safe and sound in her handbag just after he’d executed a perilous U-turn on the highway.

We were starting to see a fair few road trains – massive American-style trucks pulling multiple trailers, transporting goods up and down the highway in clouds of dust. Often Nick would give them some kind of ‘convoy’ salute as we passed them on the road. Maybe it was a greeting, maybe a plea not to flatten us under their wheels? Places like Glendambo survive on the deliveries from road trains; all the food in the shops is marked up by a dollar or two to cover the transport costs.

Our destination was Coober Pedy, a remote mining town that produces some of the world’s finest opals. The precious stones were first discovered there about a hundred years ago – the name Coober Pedy is taken from the local Aboriginal phrase for ‘white man down a hole’. Sadly the white man down a hole turned nasty at some point and told the Aborigines to bugger off.

A makeshift town has sprung up around the mines, people digging underground homes in the bedrock to escape the heat above. The surrounding desert is a sprawling moonscape of holes and rubble. Anyone can come here and get rich, but the going is sweaty and dangerous. Opals are worth a surprising amount of money – the finest unpolished stones can fetch up to a quarter of a million dollars.

We arrived there mid-afternoon, having covered nearly 400 miles in one day. It’s far from a large town, with only two or three streets, purely functional in design. One way or another, the whole place revolves around the opal trade. It lacks a lot of basic amenities – people often go on ‘fast food runs’ down to Adelaide, a seven-hour drive each way, providing a thriving black market in frozen burgers and fries around the town. Amazingly, McDonalds hasn’t thought to set up shop here.

Coober Pedy has featured in a fair few films down the years. A yard near our hotel proudly displayed the full-size spacecraft model used in filming the Vin Diesel movie Pitch Black. I am sure there are people out there who consider Vin Diesel to be the world’s greatest actor, but most of us reacted indifferently to this fabled artefact.

After checking into our accommodation (all built underground in amazing hollowed-out caverns) we went to look at the town’s underground church. This quirky innovation, a rudimentary chapel dug into the side of a hill, delivers religion and sedate organ music at consistent low temperatures all year round. ‘SEEK THE LORD WHILE HE MAY BE FOUND’ declared a sign on the wall. The altar was basically a bunch of logs nailed together, biblical in its primitive design.

Then we had a look round the opal museum, which was built on a former mine. This included a tour round an underground show-home and several of the mine tunnels, followed by the obligatory gift shop. Unique local laws forbid big mining companies from moving in and the mines are all small operations, funded on people’s retirement savings and the like.

A group of us went to an abandoned patch of ground where the public is free to noodle for opals (sifting through giant mounds of rubble looking for precious stones). Despite my gung-ho optimism every speck of dirt on the mine seemed to have been sifted by a thousand hands before and I found precisely bugger all. I was bored of opals after that.

Our party got together for dinner, enjoying pizza at the imaginatively-titled “John’s Pizza Bar”, then drinks in the underground hotel bar. Coober Pedy was an interesting world and I enjoyed seeing it, but I was relieved I’d not experienced a lucky find that might persuade me to stay here and take up the noodling life.