Day 10 & 11  Coober  Pedy  "White Man in a Hole"

If Andamooka is like Park City in 1960, Coober Pedy is like Park City in 2011- sort of, but a lot smaller Lots of tourists, lots of opal shops, lots of tourist buses. But beneath that façade still exists a core of true miners, and we met a few of them.

Coober Pedy is truly  in the outback. In the local aboriginal language, Coober Pedy is translated “the white man in the hole”. And there are thousands of opal prospect holes around the town.  There is also quite an aboriginal presence in the town. They share a lot of  the same economic and social problems as do our reservation folks.

About half of the town lives underground. Our hotel was tunnels and rooms hewn into the side of the hill.

We visited a working mine. We were the only two on the tour, so we got to do and see a lot. The guide taught us to divine for opal seams (yes, it did work) and ride the hoist and dig the opal seam.  We did find a bit of color.

The Coober Pedy opal beds are sedimentary, about 120 million years old. Many of the opals are fossils. Here are a few examples of fire opal fossils. Snails, mussels, clams , bellemites. All of thgese have really good fire. The one at the center left we found.

After a whole day and street of opals, we found a shop that had some really good aboriginal paintings by local artists. Actually, it was a pretty nice opal shop, but the owner/miner has a lot of aboriginal friends and supports their arts and sell their works at very reasonable prices, well below the tourist shops. These are not prints, but originals on canvas.

In another store, we found a whole room of very nice digereedoos; but these are very , very expensive- but cool to look at.

All in all, it was a pretty enjoyable day. We saw and did a lot of neat things, and also met a lot of neat people.