July 17, 2012

Journal highlights:

• The Big Winch
• Movie props
• Catacomb church
• Coober Pedy's desert golf course
• Opal mines
• Crocodile Harry's
• Breakaways
• Dog Fence

Pictures:

Name that movie

Name that movie

Tunneling machine

Coober Pedy Air Conditioning

Golf Course

Seems harmless enough, but this bad boy goes 100 feet deep, and you can't see it until you're right on top of it

A blower is just a giant vacuum cleaner

Don't play with explosives, kids.  That thing on the right used to be a car

Excavation mining

Crocodile Harry's

Name that movie

Crocodile Harry lived here

Name that movie

Shower

Art exhibit

Living room with piano

Bedroom

Love thine enemy... That's Crocodile Harry in the picture above the keg

Noodling machine

Brown Dog

White Dog

Sleeping Camel

The Arab

The Dog Fence

I awoke at 8:00 and had a shower.  The hallway at Radeka's is loud.  Every step echoes off the rock walls, yet I was still able to get a good night's sleep.  Internet here is coin-operated, like at John's Pizza Bar, so I think I will wait until Alice Springs to get connected.

I booked a second night here this morning, then drove down to IGA for provisions.  I bought another 3kg bag of navel oranges and a lot of canned food this time, in case I have to deal with another quarantine.  Dining out is expensive - a 9" pizza was $14, and a bottle of the cheapest beer ran $5.50.

After groceries, I drove around town and ended up at The Big Winch, which is exactly what the name implies.  I spoke with some Australian tourists there, four-wheel-drive campers, all of them.  Two couples were what they call, "grey nomads" - retirees traveling the countryside pulling large campers, while they are still fit and able.  They were traveling together, along with a red heeler named Cody.  His owners told me they got him in Coober Pedy, and that one time he hopped a fence with a 3 meter drop on the other side, and broke his leg.  They said it took several weeks to heal, and was very expensive.  In response, the woman from the younger couple (in their 40s) told about when her dog was bitten by a white-tipped spider.  It had a habit of burying its toys and then digging them back up, and in doing so was bitten.  Its face swelled up and developed ulcers from infection.  Treatment required daily injections, and she said it took six or eight weeks to heal fully.

After the older couples left, the younger pair (whose names I regrettably never got) told me that if I was planning to go north, I should stop at Stuart's Well (about 100 kilometers before Alice Springs) and see Dinky, the world-famous singing dingo.  If I was to go further up, to Darwin, they said I should stop in Berry Springs at Tumbling Waters caravan park, a hot spring with live music on most nights.

Returning to Radeka's, I mailed some postcards which I'd been meaning to do since I bought the first one in Jamaica, hopped across the street to The Dugout Cafe for a coffee underground, and took a four-hour tour in and around Coober Pedy.

The first place we stopped was only about a block or two from Radeka's, and there we saw the crashed spaceship from the movie Pitch Black.  Behind the big winch were some of the big anthill-looking mounds from the same movie.  Further down the road, we saw a truck with blower (which is apparently a method of mining unique to Coober Pedy) along with a tunneling machine.  Following that, a quick visit to the Catacomb Church, to which Phil (our tour bus driver) attends.  The church is dug out of a hillside in the shape of a cross.  Phil declared that the outside temperature could be -5 degrees (22 degrees Fahrenheit) or 55 degrees (131 degrees Fahrenheit) and temperature inside the church (and other dugouts) would remain near 22 degrees, plus or minus 5 (62-80 degrees Fahrenheit).

Our next stop on the tour was the Coober Pedy golf course.  Now, golf courses around the world often do partnerships where a member of a course in one country can play on a certain course in another country, and vice-versa.  If you believe our tour guide, then Coober Pedy's partner was St. Andrew's in Scotland, but that the membership only applies during the month of December, which is a terrible time to play either course.  It's too hot in Coober Pedy (being midsummer in the desert) and the Scottish winter is far too cold.  Phil told us that when a new member joins the golf club in Coober Pedy, he is given a small square of artificial turf from which to hit his ball.  There is no turf on the course in Coober Pedy, and the greens are black sand or gravel.  To hit that with your club would be very bad, so it's acceptable to move the ball onto your own piece of turf which you carry with you, before you swing your club.  Coober Pedy's golf course might be the only one in the world where the roads run directly through the fairways.  Cars or golf balls, you have to be careful when driving in Coober Pedy.

After the golf course, we drove through one of the fields of opal mines.  You are not allowed to enter without a permit; our tour bus was our permit.  Most of the shafts are about 18-36 inches across, and maybe a hundred feet deep, going straight down.  The wider holes are easy to spot; it's the small ones you have to worry about.  If the miner dug down from above, there will be a large "mullock" of dirt next to the hole; if the miner found something and tunneled to the end of his air duct, he would have dug straight up from below to make another shaft, and there would be no pile of dirt to warn of the hole.

Coober Pedy has been slow to adopt new technology - mining equipment is purely mechanical, and the trucks look like they were all built in the 1940s and 1950s.  Most of the opal mining here is still done on an individual basis, but Phil suspects the "big multinationals" will eventually move in and take over.  "The best way to end up with a small fortune in opal mining," he tells me, "is to start out with a large one."

Where the ground is too soft for vertical shaft drilling, it is excavated via bulldozer.  These generally don't go as deep, but run for but fun far les risk of catastrophe.  Often, removing the softer lower layers of earth leaves small, low caves in he harder rock above, where wildlife like to congregate in the summer months to escape the heat of the day.  We saw an adult kangaroo and a joey, but I wasn't able to get pictures of them.  We stepped in a smal, flat area to do a bit of "noodling" - looking for small opals in the loose soil which had already been dug up.  I got a few, along with a sample of gypsum.  Gypsum, Phil told us, is plentiful here, but the long distance makes it impractical to mine.  Its long fibers are flexible and cause problems for the tunneling machines, which are unable to cut through them, and the gypsum must instead be blasted out.

From there, we visited Crocodile Harry's home, part of which was used to film Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.  Crocodile Harry was born Baron Arvid von Blumentals from Latvia.  After World War II, he came to Australia as a crocodile hunter (back when it was still legal) before settling in Coober Pedy.  Harry was a heavy drinker - it took his first wife three weeks to sober him up enough so they could have a proper wedding ceremony.  He was also a womanizer, and went though several marriages and relationships in his life.  He died in 2006, and there has been for some time (since well before his death) a tradition of female visitors leaving their unmentionables on display at his house, hanging from the ceiling or walls.  His headstone at the Coober Pedy cemetery makes no mention of his royal lineage, but only mentions him as the locals have always known him - "Crocodile Harry."

Following Crocodile Harry's place, we passed a noodling machine, which consists of a rock crusher, a grated tumbler, and a pitch black room illuminated by blacklight, which is used to spot opals as they travel along a conveyor.  Vertigo is common among the workers in the picking room, who Phil says can only stay there for about 2 hours at a time.  We then drove up to the Breakaways, a mountain range marking the coastline of a shallow, prehistoric sea.  It has a deep connection to aboriginal heritage.  Phil told us about a friend of his who is a well-respected member of the community and works with the aborigines.  He once asked an aborigine if the man knew any of the secrets of the land here.  "I do," the man answered, " but I can't tell you.  If word got out that I was the one who told you our secrets, I'd be speared."  This wasn't 30 or 40 years ago - it was only 2010!

As we made our way back to Coober Pedy, we stopped and took pictures of a couple more rock formations - Brown Dog, White Dog, the Sleeping Camel, and the Arab, as well as the dog fence.  This is the longest man-made construction in the world - it stretches over 5,600 kilometers (3,400 miles) and is a thin wire fence whose sole purpose is to keep dingoes out of the sheep farming country.  It shows dents from where kangaroos have run into it.  These, Phil tells us, are common and harmless.  The real problem is when the feral camels come through - they hit the fence and just keep going, which lets the dingoes through.  God forbid a breeding pair comes across the fence.  Dingoes are like foxes in a henhouse.  They don't just kill what they want to eat.  They will kill everything in the place, and eat nothing.

Returning to Radeka's, I met a nice young British girl named Naomi, as I fixed my dinner, about my age.  She was trying to talk to her boyfriend via Skype, but the microphone didn't work very well, so I loaned her my gaming headphones.  She has been in Australia for two years.  She has been along every coast, and is touring inland before she goes home.  She saw that I was also a Mac user and asked me for help - she had bought a wireless Internet stick from Telstra and it wasn't connecting for some reason.  After trying a few things, I suggested she reboot her computer, and it started working again.