Blog 6  Opals and Missiles

On the 14^th   we left Uluru and travelled back to the Stuart Highway and camped again at Erldunda, then drove down over the border into South Australia,

to Marla, another road house/pub/caravan park. From there we made our way down to Coober Pedy. The country side is getting barer and barer, with less trees and more gibbers and sand.

Getting into Coober Pedy the first things you see are these piles of dirt,

The next thing is a warning sign

Set up camp at the local caravan park, but couldn’t find where to connect into the water, on asking I was told there are only 4 sites with water, “Did you want water?? So we shifted site to the last site with water. The two caravans next to us were travelling together, Percy and Michelle had come up from Adelaide to meet up with Barry and Glenda who are from Beaconsfield in Mackay, they had come across through Townsville and were going down to Adelaide. Got invited over for drinks that night and again next night.

Well Coober Pedy is certainly different, tidy town of 2012 its most definitely not, it is a very dry (water that is) town, so there is no grass anywhere, a lot of the houses are underground with just some sort of shed/entrance out the front, with 80% of the population living underground. There is heaps of old equipment lying around everywhere, the place looks like the local dump.

Coober Pedy is taken from the Aboriginal words “Kupa Piti” which means “whitefellow burrow”.

Did a trip out to the Breakaway Mountains, you are driving along till you get to this spot and all the sudden the ground falls away from you. You don’t realise how high you are till you get there, it’s quite spectacular.

We stayed in Coober Pedy a couple of days then packed up and moved south again to Woomera, home of the rockets etc, a different town, very neat and tidy, with hardly any activity, apparently the town with all its houses is kept well maintained for visiting people when they are doing their rocket stuff, you can only live there if you have a full time job. We visited the local museum, don’t ya just hate it when visiting a museum and you see gear that you used to work on and understand it.

Not that I ever worked on rockets, but some of the stuff inside I knew.

From here we moved south again down to Port Augusta, at the tip of the Spencer Gulf the beginning of the Southern Ocean. It was great to see the sea again; we have now travelled from the north of Oz (Darwin) down to the south of Oz.

On the way down some interesting road signs promoting safer driving:

Port Augusta caravan park was nice we had a site on the “beach” front, had a 6 foot fence with barbed wire between us and the beach, Again met up with the mob from Coober Pedy, Glenda and Barry from Mackay and Percy and Michelle from Adelaide, walked down to the local footy ( AFL) club that night and had dinner, good meal, had a good night, few drinks and lots of laughs.

Went for a drive down to Whyalla, the steel town on the other side of the gulf, came across another one of those South Australian road signs

After Port Augusta we moved on, heading towards Adelaide