The View Of South Australia From A Swag

If you’ve ever wondered what walking on the moon is like, you have three choices: Get several degrees in aerospace engineering and join NASA, give Neil Armstrong a ring and hope he’s in the mood for story-telling, or head to a tiny town in the centre of Australia called Coober Pedy.

This unique desert town is uncannily like an eerie lunar landscape, with white conical hills sprouting from otherwise desolate land. There’s even an abandoned spaceship in a car lot to add to the feeling of being somewhere above the earth’s atmosphere. The spaceship belongs to the (evidently lazy and litterbug) makers of Pitch Black, one of many films to choose the mining town as a space-like (or nuclear wasteland) location – one of the first being Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. In reality, the rounded domes are of course far more earthly – literally: they are the mullock heaps from the world’s largest opal mines, which attract more than 47 different nationalities to come and find their fortune in a place that must put a tremendous strain on uncreative local estate agents.

Houses are underground, you see, in an effort to get away from the unbelievable heat –often more than 55C in the summer. Imagine the conversation between a miner and his wife: “Er, honey? We’re going to live in a house without windows and where you’ll melt if you step outside. OK?”

I was on a trip from Coober Pedy to Adelaide, and we had the morning to explore this strange town. I had already enjoyed the novel experience of sleeping in a rock – our hostel was dug into the side of a hill, which meant that while it was a cold July night outside, it was a toasty constant 24C inside. After checking out the grassless golf course, exploring a mine, and of course noodling for my own bit of opal, we headed south past the famous Dog Fence, a 9,600km-long barrier that one girl on a previous trip had claimed you could see from space. She may or may not have been called Jessica Simpson.

We were following the Oodnadatta Track down to William Creek, the smallest town in Oz, with a population of just five in the summer (it reaches a whopping 17 when temperatures cool). For such a small number of potential drinkers, the pub does a roaring trade, and we settled down amongst the huge number of signed bras, T-shirts and even pants hanging from the ceiling and covering every possible wall space and soaked up the outback atmosphere.

After a night looking up at the stars from my swag in the pub’s campgrounds (I really should have borrowed some of those t-shirts to keep warm), I was up at dawn for my flight over Lake Eyre. Of the many early morning starts on this trip (mainly to fit in lots of beautiful hikes), this was the most spectacular. What better way to finish up your Perth To Adelaide Tours?

From up in the pink clouds we could see the vastness of the outback, the shimmering white salt lake, and the Old Ghan railway line running alongside the Oodnadatta Track that our bus was later to bump along towards Angorichina and Wilpena Pound for a couple of nights in the startlingly-green Flinders Ranges.

Discover the amazing wonders of South Australia with www.swagabouttours.com.au

By Victoria Williams

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