Day 72: Sunday in Coober Pedy (12/08/12)

Sometimes you do your research in a new place and then still somehow miss a vital clue, or an obvious fact, or just get it wrong! In Coober Pedy we would have liked to attend an underground church service, but had determined that there was not a church (underground) where we would feel at home. There was the Roman Catholic church we visited yesterday and the second church we were aware of was the Serbian Orthodox Church. But there were in fact 4 churches, all underground, and 1 of them was an Anglican Church.

Ah well! We consulted our store of video sermons instead and chose a sermon by Rev Vermeulen of Darling Downs on Psalm 122. We sat down and listened to it, after which we had our customary Sunday morning coffee with the usual Dutch almond cakes.

Then followed some blogging and reading to keep everything up to date. When we got tired of that, we decided to have a look at the Breakaways, a range of hills near Coober Pedy which are part of, but separate to the Stuart Range, hence the name. The route was going to be more or less a square: 15 kms down the road to Oodnadatta until we got to the Dog Fence, then about 20 kms along the dog fence until we got to the Breakaways, then about 10 kms back to the Stuart Highway and about 25 kms back to Coober Pedy. Just the thing for a little Sunday afternoon jaunt.

The Oodnadatta Road was fairly good, but surprised us with a bit of washboard which made everything rattle and shake. 

The Oodnadatta Road. The washboard made conversation difficult.

At the Dog Fence I was impressed with the statistics, but concluded that any self-respecting dingo would just walk along it to where a road like the one we were on would intersect it and then just stroll across the cattle grid. He’d curl his lip and think, honestly, do they think I’m a cow??

The Dog Fence. 5600 kilometres long. That's a lot of fence.

Joke demonstrating how dingoes can cross the Dog Fence. And if that's not on they could jump on the back of someone's ute and RIDE across!

Anyway, I’m just a city slicker, so what would I know? Perahps there’s rules for the outback, and everybody, including the dingoes play by them. The road along the fence to the Breakaways was not in as good a condition as the one we had just left. We had to try different speeds until we hit the right one where we could have an understandable conversation, the corrugations were so bad. But the landscape got progressively weirder: apparently there is a lot of mica on the surface, which glitters in the sun, but looks black everywhere else. We approached the Breakaways, multi-coloured hills which just rose out of nowhere. Here again were the prolific “lookee lookee but no touchee” signs of the PC brigade, defending the landscape against the predations of the rapacious tourist. Ignoring the signs, we just found the whole place so different and so beautiful. For a while we were the only people there, but soon enough tour buses out of Coober Pedy joined us. Never mind, there was room for everybody!

Peculiar capped mountain in the Breakaways

Desolate mountains in a desolate landscape.

The White Dog and the Brown Dog

Desolate, beyond the back of beyond, yet if you look closely there are tracks everywhere

A capped mountain and a capless one

Joke about to take a plunge!

We made our way to a couple of lookouts which gave us an excellent overview. When we had drank it all in as the mountains sat there in the late afternoon sun, we made our way out towards the Stuart Highway. This was a good gravel road, must have been graded at least once in the last year, and we left a very tall plume of dust in the still afternoon air.

Where we got on to the Stuart Highway, was about the northern end of the Coober Pedy opal field. Once again we drove past square kilometres of tailings, each near an unmarked shaft where someone had tried his luck – successfully or otherwise.

Mine tailings. Each one is next to an unmarked and unfilled mine shaft. They are not allowed to be filled in by law, apparently. Hence the many warning signs.

An active mine between this lot. You see trucks like this with the doover on top everywhere. They work like big vacuum machines, vacuuming the dirt out of the shaft.