Coober Pedy – Colrac

09/09/2018

Today we arrived in Coober Pedy. As we drove in to town we weren’t very impressed as there just seemed to be piles of dirt everywhere, no signs of grass, and old vehicle wrecks and scrap metal left seemingly where it stopped working. We later learnt that the piles of dirt are all from Opal mining. The interesting thing for us though was that the miner will drill test holes up to 30 meters deep, and the tailings will be just be left beside the hole, and the hole left exposed. By law the holes are not allowed to be filled back in or covered, they must be left exposed. The reason it can’t be filled back in is that if in a future date another miner is underground tunnelling horizontally if he was to pass under an old filled in hole, the ground above would be unstable, and collapse is a real risk. The reason the hole can’t be covered is because whatever it is covered with will deteriorate over time, probably become covered with a thin layer of dirt and become an invisible hole for future people to fall into.

So because of these reasons the country is slowly becoming like a piece if swiss cheese.

We decided to heed the advice given to us by other travelers and booked a tour of the Town and surrounding area. This isn’t something that we would normally do, but it was well worth the $65 p/p for the tour that started at 1pm and finished at about 7pm, (we were running a bit late).

As we discovered through the tour is that much of the town, and pride of town is underground, through the tour we managed to see some of this and learn some town history which is pretty well all about Gems and Gem fields.

Below are pictures from “Fayes House”, they are all underground except the pool room.