Sunday 21 November 1999 - Coober Pedy

I had scheduled my timer at 5:30am for watching the sunrise. So I get up at this time and when the sunrise was finished, I took my breakfast.
We left at 8:30am and I sat at the copilot sit instead of my primary sit. We stopped at Lake Cadibarrawirracana

And the dingo fence.

Finally, we reached Coober Pedy, leaving forever the track.

Coober Pedy (the World Opal capital) is the strangest city I’ve ever seen. There is not a lot of scaled road, no grass, and houses are mostly in metal sheet. It’s dirty and especially dusty. Really amazing.

We visited “the  Umooma opal mine and museum”. This museum features the opal mining techniques and the life way of people living underground. The entrance was small but inside it was full of corridors, rooms and stairs. It was really big, so cold and so quiet. Incredible is the word which can describe this complex.

Afterwards, we took the bus in company of a beautiful young woman ( ) guide to visit the charms of the city. We did some pitstops, specially, to visit an underground church.

When it was finished, we had our own time to carry on the exploration. Personally, I tried to find some opals. Unsuccessfully. Fortunately, the Dutch gave me one . I wouldn’t have come back with empty pockets.

After the shower (the first in 2 days), we went to John’s pizza for the dinner. We drank a wine at 10AU$/4 liters (really bad, but really strong), and finally, we finished the evening in an underground bar.
We slept underground of course !!!

Monday 22 November 1999 - nothing particular
We left Coober Pedy at 7:00 O’clock – too early for me - and we drove during all the day to reach Ayers Rock Resort (Yulara). We arrived at maybe 5:30pm. A very big drive day, very hot and very sunny. Furthermore, I tanned a little bit on the legs .
We stopped on the way at Marla, on the frontier between South Australian and Northern Territory (we dropped 1 hour on our watches), at Erlunda (for the lunch), at Mt Corner called Atila by the aboriginal people (867m above sea level), and Curtin Springs.
After the arriving at Yulara, Scott drove us to the Uluru sunset lookout for watching Ayers Rock at sunset time. Unfortunately, it was too cloudy and we couldn’t see the color change of the Rock.

Returned to the camping, we ate some delicious pasta (always cooked by our driver). Afterwards, I looked alone the stars and the full moon on Ayers Rock (from a lookout) during one hour, and went to sleep. The following picture is not from me, But I saw it like that !!

Before falling in my slumber, I eared some dingo’s screams, as wolfs’ scream. Wonderful in the darkness.