Whilst travelling through Tunisia, I visited the Bulla Regia region where the Ancient Romans had avoided the stifling heat of summer by building their houses underground. Fast forward ~2000 years and visit the town of Coober Pedy, South Australia, where the local community, have built their homes into the rock and dwell underground.
Welcome to the centre of South Australia - the Outback… an area that was once covered by the ancient Eromanga Sea but is now a baron wasteland where temperatures top 55°C (131°F) and a zillion flies attempt to slurp the liquid from the corner of your eyes. It is other worldly, harsh, exotic, intriguing and above all fascinating.
The journey to Coober Pedy takes 8 hours from Adelaide on a highway that connects the North and Southern parts of the country. With sparse rain, the area is arid but surprisingly full of life. We spotted many kangaroos, emus and reptiles on the drive and even Wedge Tailed Eagles cleaning the bones of those unlucky animals that weren’t fast enough to get out of the way of oncoming vehicles. So much unique fauna as well as flora and we happened to spot a Sturt Desert Pea on the side of the road:
When we drove into Coober Pedy, it was like a scene out of Mad Max. Giant machines, trucks and conveyer belt systems in between mounds of excavated sand. Coober Pedy exists because when the ancient Eromanga Sea evaporated, it created the perfect environment to form opal gems which are compounds of silicate and H2O to create brilliant colourful stones. Coober Pedy is a mining town but I also got the impression that it’s also a place where people go if they don’t want to be found…
The only above ground buildings are shops, a couple of restaurants and some petrol stations. Residents prefer to build their houses underground because the temperature remains constant between 20-23°C in the Summer and Winter.
We stayed in a ‘dug out’ - their affectionately name - and enjoyed the coolness of the subterranean dwelling. Residents aren’t allowed to mine within the town borders BUT there is no limitation to how many rooms you can add to your dug out. Therefore, the house with the most number of rooms has excavated 21 living spaces as part of their dug out… a great way to conduct covert mining within your own house. The mining boom attracted migrants from across the world so there are strong Italian, Greek, Croation, Czecg and Serbian communities. There’s even an underground Serbian Orthodox Church that’s open 24 hours - very convenient if you’re committing sins at any time of the day:
The Antakirinja People, the local indigenous people, call the town ‘kupa-piti’ which literally means ‘whitefellas hole’. For those not versed in Aussie slang, ‘fellas’ means ‘men’. The would use shards of opal to scrape the pelts of kangaroos that they’ve hunted. It’s really accessible to go opal hunting with a 10m x 10m plot only requiring a $50 license fee for 3 months; however, you need the equipment. With no written contracts, locals lease mining machinery to one another with nothing but expectations and verbal agreements of how the bounty will be split up. They have a saying, that if you do find opal, make sure you don’t send it out of the pit before you otherwise your partner may leave you down the pit…
Although opals are not my cup of tea, Coober Pedy sure did make for a unique vacation within Australia. It truly is a gem of what a quintessential outback town is and highly recommend that if you can afford a 16 hour return car journey, that you check it out if you’re ever in this part of the world - I hope that you do come and visit us 
