An Update...

Thursday, December 17, 2009

Hello faithfull and lovely readers.

I wish to tell you that my blog is in the Northern Territory at Alice Springs however I am in South Australia having already been to and from the West. My trip has been amazing and full of fun however I have been moving slightly too fast to tell you in time so I have got behind, just so you know and don't think I'm still up North, and I currently don't have a moustache even though I will be uploading pictures with my moustache intact, it's not Movember but it was...

So on with the story.

The time came to leave again and off I went, this time to a little place in the middle of nowhere, just like everywhere else in Australia, called Coober Pedy. This place manages to be different however in that most of the buildings go downwards not up. In order to save on Air Con they just dug down and put everything underground where the heat is much more consistent; being cool when its 50 up top and staying cool when up top freezes during the night. A place where you pray underground, read underground, eat underground but search for opals above ground. Opals of course being the only reason anyone lives in that part of the desert, it being nothing like an oasis.

I met an English Bloke here and we went on our own opal hunt for a blistering and utterly un-lucrative hour, well perhaps the one I found would have fetched 5 cents and his might have stretched to 6, however that means little in Oz where they have abandoned the use of 1 and 2 cent coins meaning everything is simply rounded to the nearest 5 multiple. So altogether we had 10 cents of opal and a big headache, plus several sneezing fits from the dust. Time to go underground! We visited a church, which was open, but no one was home, so we sneaked about and found a tunnel, leading deep into the ground, which ended in a spooky room/cave with no lights that rather reminded me of a resident evil scenario. The backpackers, run by a lovely guy named Martin, with a superb beard also reminded me of resident evil with its eerie underground layout, all thoroughly exciting and jolly good fun.

The only interesting thing we found above ground was the Spaceship from the film Pitch Black, which was about a random deserted planet, filmed around Coober Pedy, appropriate. I was kind of expecting the Spaceship to have at least a sign or perhaps be enclosed somehow but no, we crested a hill to see a road with a Spaceship parked forever, right next to it, just there in the middle of an underground town was a Spaceship by the road looking as if the owner simply couldn’t be bothered to come back and pick it up, only in Coober Pedy.