Ginger and Ed's Excellent Adventures

Is a small town in the north of South Australia where summer temperatures can regularly exceed 40 degrees C. It is famous for opals, and miners have been sinking shafts here for over a hundred years.

Early opal miners used hand tools to dig holes straight down into the ancient sea bed. They often lived in dugout at the mines due to the high temperatures and lack of building materials.

A lot of the town including bars, hotels and even churches are built in underground excavations as well.

Modern mining techniques use mechanical tunnel boring machines, blowers and knoodling machines.

The above photo is a blower, essentially a large engine that powers a suction hose that vacuums up materials from down hole into the metal drum. This is a much more efficient way to remove waste rock. Every so often the can is emptied into small conical piles which dot the landscape.

The above photo is a knoodling machine. Material is sorted by size on the right, passes along a conveyor and sorter into the enclosed room at the left end. The box at the left end has a UV light (black light) which causes the opal passing by on the conveyor to fluoresce. Pickers in the box select opals and the rest moves out the end into a dump pile. Opals picked are later evaluated.

Being an ancient sea bed, some of the opal has replaced fossil remains.

We.took a tour of a historic mine, learned about how raw opal is turned into jewelry, and saw an active modern mine.

Coober Pedy has also been a shooting location for some major films, including Mad Max Beyond Thunder Dome, Pitch Black, and Priscilla Queen of the Desert.

Above photo is me in front of wrecked ship from Pitch Black.

You can even stay in an underground motel room but we opted for an above ground caravan park with man made shade. It even had a pool contained within an old giant water tank to limit evaporative loss.

Sturt Desert Pea.

Next we were off towards the Northern Territory to Uluru-Kata Juta National Park (Ayers Rock)…