Alice Springs to Adelaide
Thursday 19th October 2006
Yes, I have finally made it to Adelaide. I have spent almost a month just travelling in the outback – it feel like an eternity – but it has been fun. On Tuesday 17/10 we got picked up at our hostel at half past six to spend the next two days in a 4×4 just to get down to Adelaide. It wasnt all bad though. We stopped off at Eldunda where Janine and I have been twice before on our Uluru tour. We do love covering old ground it seems. We also stopped at the ‘Welcome to Southern Australia’ sign as a moment to celebrate passing from Northern Territory to Southern Australia. It suddenly got colder.
There were 9 of us on the tour plus our guide, Mike, who was a jolly Aussie. Why do they always shout at the top of their voices? I can hear perfectly well I thought. The 4×4 was crampt and the pipes underneath the floor were boling hot so my feet just felt like they were on fire the whole time but we were rewarded at the end of the first day’s journey with seeing Coober Pedy.
Coober Pedy is famous for its minining of opals. They have lots of shops selling opals and people live in this town, underground. They live in a cave basically. Their rooms remain at a constant temperature and when they turn out the lights at night it is completely pitch black. We went on an Underground Mine Tour that explained how people live and how people mine the area waiting for their lucky find of opals. After the tour Janine and I went wandering around the town, which seems to have a large population of Greek inhabitants, and found a shop where a lovely Greek lady gave us a bag of stones with an opal in it. I am sure it is worthless but she insisted we take it and told me about when she moved to Australia from Greece. That night the whole group went for a Greek meal. The tzatziki tasted amazing, just like the stuff you get in Greece. Different! We slept underground that night ourselves. It is the best night’s sleep I have had in ages and we were woken at 5am by our guide playing the didgeridoo, which sounded great in an underground cave.
We watched the sunrise from Coober Pedy and headed down to Adelaide. It was a long journey but on the way we stopped off at Lake Hart, which is a big salt lake. It looked like Christmas cake icing to me. It tasted salty though. We also saw eagles on the way, a monitor lizard and a stumpy tail or sleepy lizard on the way. We stopped off at Port Augusta after lunch and then Snowtown. Our guide only told us after we had left and devoured a delicious ice cream that Snowtown is a famous town in Australia for some murders that took place. Known as the ‘Snowtown murders’ or the ‘Bodies in Barrels murders’ as there were bodies found in a disused bank there in 1999. Eight bodies were found in plastic barrels. Four people were charged with the murders. Nice. We arrived later that evening, at about 7.30pm, in Adelaide. It is much cooler here. Just in time to grab a take-away pizza and watch ‘The Da-Vinci Code’ on DVD in our hostel. Not as good as the book i might add.
Tags: Adelaide, Australia, Coober Pedy, Travel
georgiebees
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