After the record breaking descent of Uluru, I slept rather well, but woke with sore legs. After breakfast on 13th April, Anneliese and I went on an opal mine tour. The first mine was in operation and we could see how the machinery worked to lift the “mother rock” out, and then attempt to pick out the very non-obvious opals from the broken rock. On the outside opals look like normal pebbles – only when broken open is the iridescence revealed.
The guide had a very strange way of talking, without using articles – it wasn’t clear if it was a local dialect. At one point Anneliese suddenly looked at me and said “do you understand what this guy is saying??” and when I said I didn’t, she was very relieved that it wasn’t her command of English that was lacking.
After returning to the surface we were taken to a spoil heap, to “fossick” for any opals that the miners may have missed. It seemed a little unlikely that we would find anything, but this was part of the tour. To my surprise I did find a little opal, maybe 15mm x 10 mm. The guide said it was mine to keep! We then went to see an underground church, and underground home, and finally saw an opal cutting demonstration.
After lunch and siesta, I accompanied Anneliese to an opal shop where she bought 3 cut opals. I asked what the one I found was worth and they told me 50 USD! It wasn’t clear if they were proposing to buy it from me, but I had already decided that it was a nice souvenir to take home, if rather a small one.
We had already checked out of the hostel, but a Dutchman who was staying the night offered to share some food with us in the hostel kitchen, before we headed to the terminal to carry on southwards.
The Greyhound bus smelt of roses this time, and after watching the film The Hunt for Red October, I had almost a full night’s sleep. Soon after I woke up, the bus pulled into Adelaide and we all got off. I had a farewell breakfast with Anneliese and she then got on a bus for Melbourne. My next bus was going rather further… I was going to be on it for the next 24 hours. I bought a Jeffrey Archer book with short stories to keep me entertained, and boarded the Bus Australia bus bound for Kalgoorlie – the gold mining town in Western Australia.
I was sitting next to a fellow scuba diver, but one who turned out to be vastly more accomplished than me. He was a cave diver and was delighted to explain all the potential hazards of this, which he says is regarded as one of the riskiest adventure sports. Apart from the problem that if something goes wrong you have solid rock above you rather than air, the hazards are the complexity of navigation and that you have to sometimes remove the BCD and tank, and push them in front of you, to get through narrow gaps. This is because getting firmly stuck in a narrow underwater cave, with limited air in your tank, can ruin your whole day… (Aaaaarrrgh!!!)
In heading to Adelaide I had come a lot further south than I needed to, and the first 4 hours were actually spent heading back towards Coober Pedy. Due to the timing of the buses, there was no way to have avoided this without sitting in Port Augusta from 3am to 11am. Eventually, around midday, the bus passed the turn off, and struck out westwards to begin traversing the vast Nullarbor Plains.
The vegetation didn’t seem any different from what I had seen during the last couple of days heading down from Alice Springs, and it didn’t look like it would change any time soon. Reddish, flat, semi arid, with spinifex, small bushes… the comedy Ruthless People entertained us for a short period then the same flat plains kept rolling past…on and on… the Bette Midler drama Beaches came and went… and we kept on and on into the night….