Here we are in beautiful downtown Coober Pedy.

Here we are in beautiful downtown Coober Pedy.  Home of the Australian Opal, where water is at a premium price, along with petrol.  And almost every business is for sale. 

 

And then there’s the flies.  One of the locals told Chris,” don’t kill one, cause a thousand will come to the funeral” in that slow country drawl.  Reprieve of the flies occurs in the early morning hours and dusk.

We’ll be staying here for a week while we wait for a part to arrive via Melbourne.  In the meantime,  we’ll take a tour of the town, a tour of a mine shaft, and wander around a few shops.

Books are plentiful, and we have many DVD’s we haven’t seen yet.  Siestas are the order of the day as the temperatures soar to 39 deg. C in the sun. (out of the sun 29 deg.C)

It’s amazing to see the locals living under the ground, as they enclose the front entrances with makeshift doors and windows.

Rocks, which are plentiful around here have been used as landscape and rockery gardens filled with cactus and desert plants.

 

 

 

But not all houses have nice gardens and neat yards.  This one as you can see has a spanish flair to it.

 

 

 

 

Wide dirt roads, mounds of rubble every where, with air vents and TV antennas sticking out of the ground.

 

 

This place in reality should have been called Quarry City, as this is what it looks like.   But there is a reason for living underground.  As the summer temperatures here reach up to 50 deg C and the winters can drop below 10 deg C. and the underground temperature stays at a moderate 21 deg.

 

Today, we only drove around the town itself and filled up with groceries.  It’s Easter Weekend and everything will be shut up, so most people stock up for the long weekend.

It’s a unique town with mounds of dirt dotting the countryside.  And the town is aptly named by the Aboriginals “ kupa piti”, which means “white man in hole”.