The World’s Greatest Blog

The day before, during a rest stop, we had spoken to a couple who described Coober Pedy as “different”. Different it is. The approach to Coober Pedy is empty, vast, military desert land. As you get closer however, patches of the earth are black and shiny. Some people go fossicking around here, but due to our temperamental car (troubled by the rubbish petrol in the outback –“great for remote communities”) we kept going.

Coober Pedy is marked by hundred of little white pyramids. Scarring the landscape, these digging piles indicate the booming opal mining industry that sustains the underground community. By underground, I do not mean counter culture. Coober Pedy is genuinely underground. I recently spoke to a builder with whom I was working and he told me that he had grown up in an underground house in Coober Pedy.

Unsurprisingly, Coober Pedy was reminiscent of the League of Gentlemen so we quickly filled up with petrol and moved along.

An unexpected pleasure on the way to Port Augusta was Lake Hart –a salt lake. Watch some amateur footage here. It was only after seeing the “Danger –unexploded bombs” sign that we realized that we had ventured back into the Woomera prohibited area. At the shore the salt was only about one centimetre thick but its sheen gave the appearance of a full water lake.

The Old Ghan railway used to run along here and rivalled the other great “glamour” railways of the world including the Trans-Siberian Railway in Russia. Nowadays long freight trains with as many as one hundred carriages trawl along the lonely, ruined route.

The whole outback experience in places like the Olgas, the meteorite landing site and this salt lake made us feel like we were on Mars. It is not so difficult to imagine life on other planets when one sees life clinging to the bare, windswept rocks of remote Australia. Most of the rivers in central Australia run underground to the underground Artesian “sea” and only run above ground for part of the year. In such harsh conditions, we were surprised to see large kangaroos, camels and eagles flourishing. Not only that, but the desert was covered with low-profile scrub –not the endless sand dunes that are conjured up when one imagines desert.