'Coober Pedy' - July 6th - Day 11

Hold up!! Are you starting at the beginning? Check out Darwin (Kakadu) June 26th - Day one!!
Another sleep in day!! We got to sleep in until 7:30am… Wow!!

So along we went driving on this flat, flat road with flat scenery out the windows and then we reached our first stop – drove up this little hill and then all of a sudden there were hills and cliffs called the breakaways! It was pretty cool!

We then stopped at the Dog Fence which is a fence that is 5300km long! It was built to stop the dingoes and stray dogs running everywhere and keep them to one side of the road I suppose. We then had lunch which was chicken wings and headed to Coober Pedy which was our home for the night! Now when you ask the locals they’ll say CP is a hole – but I loved it! It’s an old opal mine town and most of the houses are underground – when you want to renovate or put on an addition on you just start digging! In fact we were staying underground for the night! So cool!!

We did an opal tour – of course in an underground opal mind! Which was pretty cool – we learnt that the white opals are worthless and they are called botch, it’s the coloured opals that are worth pretty pennies! We also learnt how the jewellers cut them into jewellery, did a tour of an old miner’s house and then of course into a mine where we saw botch and a piece of coloured opal left in the mine. I even bought some Christmas presents in July – who do you reckon they’re for??? Hmmmmm……

We then actually ‘went noodling for opals’ – unfortunately I didn’t find millions…

And then we went out for Pizza – for dinner – provided by the tour! It was awesome! After that we went to Josephine’s Kangaroo Sanctuary. We met Jo and Terry (the owners) and their 6 kangaroos. When Mom kangaroos get hit by cars little joey’s get brought there to get better. There was a little baby Joey named Willabe who was a week or two old… he was wrapped up like a little baby – so cute!

We then went to Desert Cave Hotel to watch the final ‘State of Origin’ game (which is like a 3 game series of the East vs. West All Stars Hockey game back at home). After that we went back to our cave to sleep!