I remember first reading about Coober Pedy a few years ago and being intrigued by the idea of a town where the majority of daily life happens underground. When we were planning our road trip we knew it had to feature in our route, and since the town sits right on the main highway from Adelaide to Alice Springs it wouldn’t even require a detour! Coober Pedy is in outback South Australia, towards the Northern Territory border, and with summer daytime temperatures regularly exceeding 40 degrees the original settlers would live in their mines to escape the heat. This tradition has continued with many of the towns buildings being built as ‘dug-outs’, with rooms or whole buildings extending underground into the red sandstone which naturally regulates the internal temperatures and reduces reliance on air conditioning.

After a few days on the road we were getting into the routine of camping in the car, cooking outside on our single gas burner (lots of one pan meals!) and using public toilets of varying levels of cleanliness, but we decided to book a room in Coober Pedy to treat ourselves and help ease the transition into car-life. We found an underground room at a budget motel/caravan park just out of town - it was basic, but we enjoyed the authentic cave-life experience!

Coober Pedy has a fascinating history as the ‘Opal Capital of the World’ thanks to the abundance of precious gems found under the desert soil and there are a number of mine tours available. We opted to visit the Old Timers Mine, which is a museum built into an old mine in the centre of town. We got to don hard hats and venture down into the old mining tunnels and saw some opal deposits in the walls. They also had examples of traditional and modern underground homes, and other than the lack of windows, they were pretty comfy - they even had working toilets and showers underground!

After lunch at the town’s best rated ‘restaurant’ (the petrol station) James put on the ‘L’ plates and we took a drive around town. We discovered the local golf course, notable for its complete lack of grass! The course only opens one day a week so we didn’t get to tee off on the astro turf or putt on the black ‘greens’ but it was an interesting stop and allowed us to test Nigel the Nissan’s 4WD capabilities on the steep rocky driveway and a dusty, bumpy dirt road detour back into town.

We rounded out our stay in Coober Pedy by seeing a few more sites. For a small town, Coober Pedy has a surprisingly diverse community including a large number of Serbians, Greeks and Italians. As a result there are a number of Churches, many of which are underground. We visited the Catholic church, which is dug into the rock just off the high street. Other then Opals, Coober Pedy’s other main claim to fame is as the set for a number of films, in particular sci-fi films due to the desert around the town looking like the surface of another planet. One film crew left behind a rather sizeable memento in the shape of a full-size space ship prop which was used while filming ‘Pitch Black’ with Vin Diesel in the late 90’s, it now sits outside a hotel in the centre of town.

A couple of days in Coober Pedy was enough time to see all the main sights and rest a little from some long days of driving before we started another long couple of days of driving up into the Northern Territory. Definitely a unique place unlike anywhere else I’ve ever visited! Next up, Uluru!