Coober Pedy

In choosing the best pictures from our collection, I ended up selecting more of Christa's pictures than mine. Grrr...

We took a two day trip up to the northwest. Our first destination was Coober Pedy: the self-proclaimed "Opal Capital of the World". The majority of the world's opals are from here. Its other important industry is tourism and there are a plethora of shops and tourist destinations trying to lure you into their tours or opal shops.
A view of downtown Coober Pedy:

Coober Pedy is a town of several thousand in the middle of the desert. Opals were discovered here in 1915. The original mining was done by hand. The miner would dig a vertical shaft up to 30 meters deep. When they discovered horizontal stripes that indicated the possible presence of opals, they would start to dig horizontal tunnels through the seam.
Replica of early miner digging a shaft:

Hand dug mine tunnel:

Opal in the rough:


Just for comparison, here is a tunnel dug by modern mining equipment:

This is the display outside one of the opal mine tours. This type of truck is a giant vacuum cleaner that assists the opal miners. As rock debris is created in the mine and needs to be removed, it is vacuumed up by these trucks through a long hose and stored in the barrel at the top. The truck can then go dump the debris in one of the piles of scrap scattered all around the surrounding country side. In the back of the picture you can see piles of scrap.

Occasionally, opals make into these scrap piles by mistake. The term for searching through the scrap looking for opals is "noodling".

The opal mine tour we took:

The weather here can get really hot in the summers. After WWI, returning troops working in the mines built homes and shelters underground where the temperature remained constant.
An example of an old underground house:

About half the houses and some of the buildings today are underground. The mine museum we went to had a sample underground house: (The grooves on the ceiling are from the excavating equipment.)
Kitchen:

Bedroom:

We also went to a cool underground restaurant.
Stairs down to the dining room:

Eating lunch in the underground restaurant: