Today was the first day that we stayed multiple nights in one place. We started off by waking up early to go on the tour around Coober Pedy. It started around 8 am and we drove to the underground catholic church first. It was really cool to be under the mountain and it was so nice and warm under there with it rarely changing from 22 degrees. It looked like your regular small catholic church but with the add-on being that the walls and roof was rock. After we left the Catholic Church, we went to the Umoona Opal Museum. It started out by going into the underground cinema which was a projector screen with wooden seats underground. It played a video that explained how opal was made and discovered in Coober Pedy and how it became a town. After we watched that, we went through to a small room that was a small miners’ quarters in the mountain. We then went down into the opal mine where we saw all the different explosives the miners used to cut into the rock, and we saw how you can find opal using a blacklight and we saw the traces of it leading to a deposit of opal. After we got out of the mine, we were led into a dug-out home which is a home that is dug into the mountain. It was really spacious, and I could imagine myself living there. The only problem is that when the lights turn off, it is pitch black in there, even in the middle of the day. After we left the museum, we went to the underground Anglican Church, that looked a lot like the Catholic Church but without the stained glass and it had the fish symbol on the wall. Then we went to the Coober Pedy sign which is a black mining truck on top of a sign that says Coober Pedy. We also looked at the golf course that has blacks instead of greens on the course because they couldn’t get any green to use for it. When the tour ended, we walked around town and spent a few hours looking through all the opal stores to find one we liked. The problem was, was that it is very expensive. Any opal that is a pretty good size to get costs $1000. In the end, I had to buy an opal that was on a discount of $30 for each karat. I could only get a 2.4 karat opal that cost $70, and it was only 1 centimetre long! But it does have a lot of colours in it with it having all sorts of reds, greens and blues on a white background, so it looks really good! After we went around town, we drove to the breakaways to have dinner. The breakaways are a big drop-off in the terrain with it suddenly dropping 20-30 meters. It looks really nice as the land just keeps going when it drops off so you can see so far! In the photos I took though, it doesn’t look as big or grand as it did in real life, so I don’t really know why. Anway, after we ate dinner, we came back to the van because it was already getting dark. Tomorrow we will also be staying in Coober Pedy, and we are planning on doing some noodling in the slags to look for some opal.

Image 1: Black Blower mining truck sign
Image 2: My opal
Image 3: Opal traces in the wall of the mine
Image 4: Opal mine
Image 5: Underground Catholic Church
Image 6: Breakaways