Coober Pedy

Don't walk backwards!

We were surprised to see that Amy and I made up two thirds of the passengers on our trip from Alice Springs to Adelaide. At least we had plenty of room to stretch out during the 20 hours of driving, packed into two days.

And so we watched out of the window as the red earth of the Northern Territory gradually turned to white as we headed to the opal mining town of Coober Pedy, where I spent my birthday. There wasn't much there - a few restaurants, a couple of pubs, a discarded model spaceship from a failed Val Kilmer film called Red Planet, or something. My birthday present from the girlfriend was a sky-gazing tour - a barmy local man drove us out to the desert and pointed out constellations for a couple of hours, which I'll endeavour to remember so I can bore people with their names for years to come. We slept in a large, underground dorm which was basically a cave with beds in. A bomb could have gone off outside and we wouldn't have heard it.

See some of our Coober Pedy pictures.

We're currently in Adelaide and took a Groovy Grape wine tour yesterday, which was a lot of fun. Our group were a really great bunch and we each got through about 30 varieties of white, red, desert wine and port by the end of the day. We still made it to the pub afterwards, though. What did I learn about wine? That it makes you feel sick if you drink a lot of it.

On the way back, our tour bus broke down on a busy roundabout and we had to climb out and push start it (see photo), which helped work off some of the booze.