COOBER PEDY, Australia - The bank manager stores explosives in his kitchen pantry. A French expatriate who goes by Oui Oui allows her two pet lizards to lounge at a popular bar. At least half the residents live in underground "dugouts," and at any given moment, men and women can be seen "noodling" in public.
Eccentricity in this tiny opal-mining town is as normal as a 112-degree day.
"Noodling" is Outback slang for the search for gems among excavated mines. The translation of the aboriginal Coober Pedy is "white man's hole in the ground."
With an estimated 250,000 mine shafts in the area, there are plenty of opportunities to noodle. And plenty of opportunities for careless tourists to fall into a mine shaft. (Warning signs, depicting a stick figure plummeting headfirst into oblivion, are posted everywhere.)
Opals were first discovered here in 1915 by 14-year-old Willie Hutchison, who had traveled from Marree by camel with his father to prospect for gold. Today, Coober Pedy is the world's largest producer of opals.
Most of the 3,000 residents are wannabe millionaires who have lost more money than they've made. Among the international cast of prospectors you'll find are aborigines, Greeks, Italians, Lebanese, Chinese, Indian, Irish - about 50 ethnicities are represented.
After an 11-hour bus ride from Adelaide, I arrived at this Outback outpost. The town is surrounded by hundreds of miles of barren ground that is cracked and dried, thanks to an unforgiving sun and lack of precipitation.
In the distance lie countless heaps of pulverized sandstone, the detritus from the mines. There is no grass. Few trees. The town's main road - a paved, dust-blown strip lined with rickety opal shops, some of which are surprisingly elegant on the inside - begins at the McCafferty's/Greyhound bus depot and merges with the desert about four blocks later.
Coober Pedy's end-of-the-world appearance has not been lost on Hollywood moviemakers. Much of Mel Gibson's Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome was filmed here in 1985, then 1994's The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, starring Terence Stamp, and 2000's Red Planet with Val Kilmer.
But Oui Oui, Queen of Radeka's, is an unfilmed story.
Like many of Coober Pedy's residents, Oui Oui (real name is Yveline Page) first visited while on holiday, 13 years ago. Before the vacation ended she had been infected with opal fever. After a brief trip home to Brittany, France, she returned to Coober Pedy, took a job as a waitress and has been mining for opals (with little success) ever since.
With her Greek-Australian boyfriend Tony Karetsian, Yveline now owns Radeka's Downunder Motel, a popular youth hostel that served as my home for a week. Built underground to protect occupants from the extreme heat, Radeka's, like most "dugout" structures in town, was carved with hand picks and tunneling machines. Within the perfectly cut rooms, there is running water, electricity an Internet cafe and other creature comforts.
Dugouts maintain an average temperature of about 68 degrees. Air shafts provide ventilation. When the lights go out, it is like sleeping in a cave.
One night, while sipping another Victoria Bitter at Radeka's bar, I got a sense of what it is like to be a local. A cricket match played out on the TV behind the bar. Tony smoked cigarettes and coughed while watching. Yveline fed watermelons to her pet lizards.
Ashley Wood, the soft-spoken Wespac Bank manager, leaned toward me from the next bar stool. "On one shelf in my kitchen pantry," he said matter-of-factly, "there's a box of cereal, a bag of rice and a few sticks of gelignite."
Similar to dynamite, gelignite is made of gelled nitroglycerine and potassium nitrate. The explosive is readily available at stores around town. "Everybody has a few sticks lying around," Wood said.
And so explosives dominated the bar conversation. George Aslamitzis, a Greek miner, slapped me on the back and explained how he and other locals use Nitropril for mining excavations:
"You take newspaper and roll into cylinder. Then you pour Nitropril, stick in fuse, you light and BOOM!"
My startled reaction must have intrigued him. "You want we blow something up?"
"Ahhhh. well, I . . ."
"Tomorrow, we go mining," he said. "I show you."
And so the next day George and Tony took me to the mining claim they share. We drove along a bumpy dirt road to a group of dusty hills, 15 minutes outside of town.
At the base of one of the hills I saw a rectangular doorway that had been perfectly cut by a tunneling machine. The truck stopped here. We unloaded equipment (extension cords, lamps, flashlights and a huge hand-held drill) and walked single file toward the opening.
"Watch for kangaroos," warned George. "Sometimes they stay in mine to get out of the heat."
Should a kangaroo come bounding along the narrow opening, he told me, I should flatten myself against the wall. "If not, the kangaroo, he run over you."
Startled kangaroos notwithstanding, we entered the mine. George and Tony took turns drilling into the sandstone walls, looking for colored glints of opal that could change their lives forever. After a couple of hours of fruitless drilling, they gave up.
Back outside, George made a Nitropril bomb and planted it atop a nearby hill. We watched it explode. then we drove back into Coober Pedy.
Next stop: Alice Springs, Australia.
- Elliott Hester, author of Plane Insanity: A Flight Attendant's Tales of Sex, Rage and Queasiness at 30,000 Feet, has given up his day job to travel around the world for one year. His dispatches appear regularly in Travel. Contact him at megoglobal@hotmail.com or visit www.elliotthester.com
[Last modified April 26, 2003, 07:27:35]
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