After seven straight days of tours and travel, I took a much needed rest day in Alice Springs today. I did my laundry and spent some time wandering around town. Alice Springs is a pretty small place, so it didn’t take very long before I got bored... like... really bored.
I had a coupon for a free beer from a place in Alice Springs, so I walked around to try and find the place. I had troubles finding the place. I took some wrong turns (I blame bad street signs) and I walked past it at least once. No wonder I had troubles finding it... when I finally got there I saw that the place was closed for liquor license violations. Bah!
I had troubles finding anyone at the hostel to talk with so I started SMSing people on my phone. After complaining about how bored I was to Gio (the girl from Ottawa that I met in Melbourne) we talked on the phone for a while to relieve each other’s boredoms and complain about our problems. Being chatty on the phone wasn’t something I really did much at home, so I had to remember that they can be useful for more than making hostel bookings, SMSing, or being flashlights in dark dorm rooms with other sleeping people. You can talk to people on them, too!
July 14, 2008
Today I (thankfully) left Alice Springs and took the Greyhound bus almost 700 km further south down the Stuart Highway to Coober Pedy. The journey took about eight hours over some of the most desolate landscape I’ve ever seen. For hours there was literally nothing except sand, rocks, and scraggly bushes on the side of the highway. It was truly an inhospitable landscape.
I arrived in Coober Pedy around 6 PM. I would spending 24 hours there and be taking the next Greyhound bus the next day. I got a ride to my backpacker’s hostel, Radeka’s Underground. Just like many of the places in Coober Pedy, the place was located mostly in an old mine underground. Because of the extreme heat in the summer and the ample supply of abandoned mines, many of the people in Coober Pedy live underground. The words “Coober Pedy” literally mean “white men in holes” in the local Aboriginal language.
I explored my underground home for a little while before venturing out to find dinner and explore a bit. Most of the people at my backpackers were a bunch of teenagers on a bus tour. It wasn’t really likely that I’d find anyone to have dinner with or hang out with, so I resigned myself to eating dinner by myself again.
After about five minutes of walking up and down the single main street I saw a couple of guys coming out of a bottle shop with a box of beer. One of them looked very familiar. Woah! It was Piotr (the Polish guy from my Darwin to Alice Springs tour). Piotr, and a bunch of other people from that tour had continued from Alice Springs on another tour and were, by coincidence, spending the night underground at another backpackers in Coober Pedy. I couldn’t believe my luck. I joined them for dinner at the local pizza bar. I guess I didn’t have to have dinner by myself after all!
After dinner they invited me over to their underground backpackers for drinks and to hang out. It was good times! I was happy (free beer is a good thing -- and I was with a bunch of people that I liked)! We ended up staying up late and they asked me to stay the night in their backpackers instead of mine. It sounded good to me. My own backpackers was essentially one long, crooked hallway with open side rooms with bunkbeds. It was also full of teenagers that were probably going to be really noisy. I was happy to stay at the other backpackers... I got a room all to myself!
July 15, 2008
As always, on the Oz Experience tours the other people had to wake up early to hit the road. They treated me to breakfast, said our goodbyes, and they left. I headed back to my own backpackers (only across the street and up half a block) to have a shower and get cleaned up. It’s funny that I had a better night’s sleep at the backpackers that I didn’t pay for instead of the backpackers that I did pay for. I even left my pack and stuff at Radeka’s. I had no idea if anyone else slept in the same dorm that I was supposed to sleep in, but no one touched my stuff or noticed my absence, so it was no big deal.
Finally, I got a chance to walk around and explore Coober Pedy a bit. It’s one of the most bizarre and alien places I’ve ever been. It’s a huge mining centre for opals (something like 95% of the world’s opals are mined in or around Coober Pedy), and the landscape is littered with thousands of open mine shafts and piles of dirt. I felt that I was standing on a futuristic, but rustic, mining colony on Mars.
The town was also filled with derelict mining equipment of all sorts: bulldozers, blowers, and drills.
To complete the Martian mining colony setting, the town had a few old spaceships lying around. They weren’t real space ships, though. The town had been the site of several movie shoots and the space ships were old discarded props.
That afternoon I went on a tour. The only other people on the tour were Melanie, a university student from Germany, and Brian, our tour guide. Brian had been a miner in the past, digging for opals in the plains outside Coober Pedy. He told us many stories of his mining days. On the tour we stopped at a few places inside Coober Pedy, including the cemetery and golf course. No grass can really grow in Coober Pedy, so the whole course is dirt and sand. You are allowed, however, to put a little piece of artificial turf under your ball before you take your shot. Seriously, this place just keeps getting weirder and weirderer.
We also stopped in a few place outside of Coober Pedy, too, including the minefields, Crocodile Harry’s home, the Breakaways, the Dogproof Fence (5300 km long!), and the Moon Plains. At the minefields, we stopped for about twenty minutes to “noodle” or “fossick” for opals. Noodling is just a fancy word for kicking around in the dirt to see if you spot something pretty and valuable. Occasionally people still manage to find opals sitting on the surface. I didn’t find anything except a lot of sand and some stray pieces of worthless gypsum.
After the tour was over we returned to Coober Pedy where I had dinner by myself at a nearby Greek restaurant. I was craving souvlaki and made sure to drink a nice healthy amount of wine to help me sleep on my overnight bus to Adelaide.
July 16, 2008
It took eleven hours to cover the 800 km between Coober Pedy and Adelaide. My sleep on the bus wasn’t too bad. I was expecting much less sleep than I ended up getting. Yay wine!
I arrived in Adelaide about 6 AM. I was taking another overnight bus to Melbourne that night. I had 14 hours to explore Adelaide. I locked up my backpack in a bus station locker and started exploring. I had breakfast at a cafe and took advantage of some free wireless internet. I booked myself onto a special tour for the afternoon and then began my official sightseeing of the city.
Adelaide is the capital city of the state of South Australia (Australian state names are so unoriginal!) and has about one million inhabitants. The city centre, especially around the river, has lot of colonial British architecture and parkland which is definitely rather pretty.
At 10 AM sharp (opening time) I showed up at the State Museum. It’s a pretty decent museum with lots of aboriginal and Pacific Islander artifacts. With free admission, the price is right, too.
After a short bus ride, I arrived at my 1 PM special tour. My favourite Australian beer is Cooper’s, and the brewery is located in Adelaide. My ulterior motive for my brewery visit was to buy a branded Cooper’s shirt of some kind. I had watched, for months, as people paraded by me in ubiquitous Beer Lao and Beer Chang t-shirts from Laos and Thailand. They might have made good souvenirs for those people, but not for me. I don’t even like Beer Lao or Beer Chang. Cooper’s, though, was a worthy beer for a souvenir!
The admission for the tour was $20, but all of the money went to charity. Cooper’s wasn’t running the tour for profit. They only charged the fee to keep the riff-raff out who showed up only for the free beer. Oh yes, there was free beer at the end of the tour! We got to sample the full Cooper’s line, and I got to keep my beer glass! I hope it can survive for almost two months in my backpack.
Just like me, there were a few other like-minded beer snobs on the tour. After the tour, me and two other guys (one from Winnipeg and the other from Perth, Australia -- but I can’t remember their names) decided to visit a pub to use up the rest of the afternoon. The Aussie guy SMSed his friends who lived in Adelaide to suggest a good pub for us. My request was for the pub with the “best value for awesomeness.” The Aussies recommended the Crown and Anchor pub. We didn’t know where it was, but we figured we would ask around and someone would direct us.
Once we reached the city centre we set out to look for the pub. We asked a couple people sitting on a sidewalk patio if they knew where it was. Oh, they thought it was two or three blocks to the south. So we headed in the direction. After walking for a bit, we asked some more people. They told us it was on the complete other side of the city centre, but they didn’t know what exact street it was on. Crap! Did no one know where this place was?
We started walking in the general direction of the pub across town. After a few minutes a car pulled up beside us and told us to get in. It was one of the people who gave us directions! He felt bad for giving us poor directions and offered to drive us to the place. Well, that’s nice!
Finally at the pub, we got down to some drinking. There weren’t many other people there, so we sat down at the bar and let the cute bartender entertain us.
I admit that I had a few too many beers that afternoon. Since I didn’t have any dinner, the beers were hitting me pretty hard as I stumbled back to the bus station. It’s a good thing that Adelaide’s city streets are a neat grid pattern, or I might not have found my way back to board my bus to Melbourne.
The bus ride made me woozy and I got sick in the bus toilet. Yuck. Chalk that up to another one of the interesting places I’ve vomited on this trip.
I finally had dinner at the first rest stop and tucked in for the long ride to Melbourne. I didn’t sleep so well, though. I tried to stretch out across my two seats with my feet hanging over the aisle, but these stupid trogs kept trying to get past all night long and kept bumping into my legs and giving me dirty looks. Jerks.
July 17, 2008
Arrived at good old Southern Cross station in Melbourne shortly after sunrise and checked into good old Melbourne Travelers Connection Hostel nearby.
I didn’t really do much today. I got a cheap haircut in the morning by a student in a school. I took advantage of the free wireless internet at the State Library (it seems to be my most frequent activity in Melbourne) before meeting Joe Clancy for hot chocolate in the afternoon. The Melbourne weather was still chilly so a good hot chocolate was really nice. I showed Joe my pictures from Coober Pedy (which was one of the few places he had yet to go in Australia) and he showed me pictures from his trip to Samoa and Tonga to inspire me on my own upcoming trip there.
That evening I watched TV in the TV room of the hostel. I was amused that some of the same people who were there three weeks ago were still stuck there.
I went to bed early that night. I was exhausted, and I had to make sure that I woke up in time for my super amazingly awesome business class flight to Samoa the next day!
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