I grew up going on opal fossicking holidays as a kid - Coober Pedy, Mintabie, White Cliffs, Lightning Ridge, etc. We'd camp somewhere and then spend the days digging around getting filthy and finding opal, which was great fun. My maternal uncle was an opal dealer at one point in life and both he and my paternal grandfather had opal cutting/polishing setups in their sheds at some point. My dad did a work placement up there for a few months, renting an underground place.
Beside the curiosity of underground living, Coober Pedy is a grim place. Hot, dry, dirty. You couldn't pay me to live there. There's a lot of cheap accommodation on real estate sites as a result.
I passed through last year on an outback trip, and stopped there for my kids to dig around. Way back, there were countless places you could "go noodling" (fossicking) but best bet last time seemed to be Jewellers Shop Road: https://goo.gl/maps/3thJiKfzY1YQaxkY6 It's picked pretty clean, but we found a few chips (small pieces) with colour (as opposed to less valuable forms like "potch") - you just have to be patient and have fairly focused kids!
Not sure how active the surrounding area is these days. Mostly seems to be idle blowers (vac-based machines that bring material up from shafts) and mullock heaps. I think the heavy action has progressively moved up to other opal fields a few miles out of town.
The story I always liked was about opal showing up under UV lighting. They'd rip up material from shafts with blowers and pass it along a conveyor belt for pickers to watch with UV lights and grab at opal as it went by. Only issue was that scorpions also glowed... You can see prospectors talking about using this method here: https://www.prospectingaustralia.com.au/forum/viewtopic.php?...
Probably my favourite memory was a place called Grasshopper in Mintabie. The operators would blast in an open cut mine with dynamite, and then huge grading machines would drag the leftover scraps up to an area they let the public pick over looking for smaller pieces of opal. We were like birds showing up on a lawn after it's been mown.
Another spot was Concrete/Cement Hill. My little brother (5yo at the time?) had become bored finding nothing and decided to make a cave house for a caterpillar he'd found. While the rest of us toiled with heavy tools, he mucked around with this bloody caterpillar, and found two pieces of opal worth $500-1000 in the process...
Cool stories, thanks for sharing. Reminds me of some places in the California desert (Trona comes to mind, just without the underground houses).
I've been near but not to Trona. Driven through Wonder Valley in California though which is pretty grim - at least that has low shrubs... This is what the area just outside Coober Pedy looks like: https://goo.gl/maps/C4E9xid1tY8CRp2f8 And closer in to the township: https://goo.gl/maps/1dZYqCgjB3nxzEfE7
Fairly inhospitable!
Having stayed in an "underground" (nowadays we'd call it passive design) BnB out there, it really is remarkably comfortable compared to the outside temperature. During the days it's bakingly hot, and freezing and dry at night; but always pleasant in the rooms, with no need for A/C or heating. Ventilation is a bit of a problem as you might expect, it got a bit stuffy.
By "stuffy" do you mean just stale air, or is there also excess humidity?
Been decades since I stayed in a cave hotel in Coober Pedy, but I have stayed in a "trog" home in France and a cave BnB in Turkey - as much as the stuffiness, it felt like there was mineral-heavy dust always in the air, from the stone walls? My nose was quite sensitive to that.
> no need for A/C or heating
Soon to be very valuable...
I think houses without a basement will drop in value in the near future.
I'm an American citizen and I needed to go to the hospital in Coober Pedy in 2009. It was after hours, so I rang the bell up front and a cheerful nurse responded on the intercom. My case was deemed sufficient to merit a response, so the nurse and a doctor both came over at once and booted up the place. I got my exam, some crutches, and a prescription in about an hour and $45.
Also all the water is trucked in, so shower stalls are often coin-fed. Works OK except when there is no warning that you're about to run out of water and your face is covered in soap. Makes it hard to find and fidget with coins.
> Also all the water is trucked in, so shower stalls are often coin-fed. Works OK except when there is no warning that you're about to run out of water and your face is covered in soap.
Seems like you'd get used to it quickly.
In Chinese apartments (in Shanghai, at least), there is a small water heater dedicated to the shower. It stores a certain amount of water at a temperature you configure, and when it runs out, your shower will be cold. (You're expected to set it much hotter than you want the shower, and mix it with cold water, which is unlimited, to get the shower temperature you want.)
This means it's impossible to take a two-hour hot shower. But it also means the showering process doesn't include "step 0: wait a few minutes for hot water to start coming out of the shower". When you turn on the hot water, you get hot water. It's really soured me on the American system.
> it also means the showering process doesn't include "step 0: wait a few minutes for hot water to start coming out of the shower". When you turn on the hot water, you get hot water. It's really soured me on the American system.
The "American System" such as it is, is a byproduct of increasing efficiency. If you buy an old house, built when shower heads were 5GPM, the piping was sized to handle that load. When you switch to 2.5GPM shower heads (mandated as the maximum by federal law in 1994), or lower (1.25GPM is easy to find and what I use) then you've got 4X the amount of water setting in the pipes that needs to be slowly flushed out.
Any competent builders of new homes will minimize the size of hot water pipes to greatly reduce the amount of cold water that needs to be flushed out. Instead of 3/4 or 1/2" pipes, 3/8" or even 1/4" pipes may be adequate for a 1.8GPM (California 2018 maximum) shower, and greatly reduces the amount of cold water standing in the pipes.
The US system of using natural gas (or electric heat pumps) offers about 4X better energy efficiency than smaller resistive electric point-of-use water heaters. In warmers climates (southern US, and much of Asia) the difference can be small. And the centralized US system can be retrofitted easily enough. There are pump systems which can be installed under bathroom sinks where you just push a button and the cold water is pumped through, automatically shutting off when it becomes warm/hot.
Increasing energy efficiency, mayhaps, but running cold water in a shower for several min while you wait for it to heat up is not very water efficient.
> It's really soured me on the American system.
What American systems? There's lots of different water heating setups in the US, including âsmall dedicated tankless heater for the showerâ, whole house tankless or hybrid system, etc., etc...
Another place I stayed in Coober Pedy on another visit had a warning at 15 seconds which mitigated the problem. Both places only let you load up five minutes of shower time, and I found that my showers took 7-8 minutes.
you know you can install tankless heaters at the shower in the US if you want instant hot water?
sinks too, theyre even easier. you can find kits at Home Depot.
Tankless water heaters have a downside in that there's a minimum amount of flow before the heater turns on. I stayed at an Airbnb in Italy where I had to continuously run the sink in order to take a warm shower that wasn't scalding hot or cold. I also had to run the bathroom sink to get hot water at all in the kitchen because the kitchen faucet alone wasn't enough to trigger the heater!
The last three places I've lived in the United States all had tankless systems.
Like most comments on HN, "American System" is a gross oversimplification of a nation of almost 400 million people and experiences.
Coober Pedy was highlighted in an episode of Instant Hotel on Netflix here https://www.netflix.com/title/81023011
It was a good episode! I can hear the locals talking in my head just remembering it. Itâs worth a watch if youâre into architectural television.
Tom Scott had a fascinating video about the town a while back. Well, it was supposed to be about the town, and its water supply in particular, but became a video about the reliability of research and videos you find online.
Erik Anders Lang also has a neat video of their "golf" course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMpr0ShaQak
Some additional background on the reciprocal rights they enjoy with St. Andrews in Scotland:
https://www.espn.com.au/golf/story/_/id/13173734/st-andrews-...
Well that was delightful!
I loved visiting Coober Pedy. It reminded me of The Flintstones - you're in a room carved out of the rock and yet there's a TV in the corner.
Also it's a real "prospector town" since the massive mining companies consider it cost inefficient to mine there at scale so it's full of characters.
I'm struggling with this sentence:
The town of Coober Pedy is only accessible by a small airstrip, by coach tour or private car, and via the Ghan railway line running between Darwin and Adelaide.
So... it's "only" accessible by air, automobile, or rail? Does their readership travel exclusively by steamship? Camel?
It is accessible by car, but only after 850km (528 miles) driving through mostly empty desert. I guess the author wanted to convey the isolation of the town, but the wording just turned out very awkward because yeah, despite the huge distances from anywhere else, the place is actually quite accessible if you have the time to spend on the way there (or the money to get a plane there somehow).
A ticket on the Ghan starts at around $2600, it's a luxury service ... it's not "rail" like you might suppose.
It _is_ a weird sentence though. I guess they wanted to say its only accessible by road?
But that's also a bit weird as that describes 98% of towns in Australia.
Even just "private car". What an odd way to say you drive there. Aka the only way to get to most towns. Having a railway and airstrip makes Coober Pedy more well connected than most.
I think that might be the most rarely leaves megacities sentence I've ever read.
I would guess they prefer major airstrips to fly directly into? Maybe the implication of small airstrip is that it is only chartered planes and therefore super expensive? But yeah, I also thought that was funny
Even then, you can fly from the nearest capital Adelaide in two hours for AU$300. Anyone sane is likely to be doing it by road as part of a trip from Adelaide to Uluru/Alice Springs/Darwin.
If you're in the western hemisphere and want to experience cave homes without going all the way to Australia I highly recommend Goreme and all of Cappadocia in Turkey. They have hotels built into cave homes thousands of years old, open air museums with cave cities and complexes from thousands of years ago. I went there because my girlfriend wanted to ride hot air balloons but I ended up loving it and being blown away by all the ancient ruins https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/357/gallery/
I also highly recommend that area. My brother and I had an amazing day where we climbed out of the regular paths and walked around for dozens of kilometres exploring valleys and climbing up into remote carved corridors and rooms. Found some incredible terrain.
If you're in the USA, you can find something similar to Cappadocia in Bandolier National Monument, New Mexico. Similar geology in the carved volcanic ash/tuff, plus a nice campground within walking distance.
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