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Day 4
Uluru to Coober Pedy..
We got up once again at 04-30 to see our last Uluru sunrise and also because we had to drive 850km across the desert to our next stop Coober Pedy. Over 12 hours of driving across the empty desert and we arrived in Coober Pedy. What a strange place. It is the opal mining capital of the world. The desert all around has been transformed into a moonscape due to all the mining. Anyone can become an opal miner, you just pay A$75 to register as a miner and about the same to buy the rights to a mining plot. Then it's off out into the desert and get digging - in one of the most hostile environments in the world. If you run out of water you've 3 hours to live. The town looks like a quarry and has an atmosphere like the wild west. The reason it looks like a quarry is that most of it has been mined and in any case the population lives in caves to escape the desert heat - whole houses complete with living room, bedroom, bathroom etc all hollowed out of the rock. Coober Pedy is aboriginal for « White Mans Burrow ». And our night in Coober Pedy we could abandon our swags and we got a bed - in a cave !
In such a strange and isolated place where fortunes can sometimes be made or people toil away for months for no return,alcohol and associated problems are a big issue. Sale of alcohol to aborigines is strictly forbidden and anyone else can only buy a limited amount of beer and max 1 bottle of wine per day per person.
Just up the road from our « cave » was a kangaroo sanctuary which we visited where a lovely old couple devote their life to saving injured kangaroos. See photo of the joey ( the name for a baby kangaroo).
Then it was a fantastic nights sleep in our luxury accomodation - but we did miss the swag a bit.
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