Mario and Pat's Australian drive holiday

Day 4: Port Augusta, SA Coober Pedy, SA Distance travelled: 540km

We had breakfast and were on the road by 8am heading north to Coober Pedy.

The Stuart Highway starts at Port Augusta, SA and ends in Darwin NT, a total of 2780km

The landscape heading north on the Stuart Highway was constantly changing, from sparse vegetation and flat terrain, to hills and heavy vegetation.

Our first stop was Woomera. Woomera Village is a small, remote, Australian Defence Force Base servicing the RAAF Woomera Test Range in the far north-west pastoral region of South Australia. We wanted to visit the museum, but it was closed. There were many historic pieces on display outside though, so we settled for that. The Woomera Prohibited Area (WPA) is a globally unique military testing range. It covers nearly 124,000 square kilometres in north-west South Australia. Now mainly used by the Australian Air Force for testing. Further north in this area was used for nuclear testing in the 1950s.

On one of our rest stops I met a guy with a very nice Motor Home, towing a car and Jet Ski. Had a great chat with him. He has been on the road for the last 2 years 4 moths. I got some great stories from him.

Coober Pedy got its name by the aborigines. It means white man burrows.

We arrived at Coober Pedy around 2pm and checked in our underground hotel (Lookout Cave Underground Motel). We did a little sightseeing, but from the street there is not much to see. That’s because most things are underground. The temperatures range from a low of -3 C in the winter to +53 C in the summer. Early miners – many of them veterans from WW1, used to living in trenches – had dealt with the lack of local building materials by digging into the hills and making their homes in ‘dugouts’. They soon discovered that the underground temperatures were a pleasant constant 22 C to 25 C. Now, almost all the residents live underground. The exception is (of course) any claustrophobic and also aborigines, who equate being underground with dying.

We did a tour of one of the underground mines, which also included a look at a typical underground home. Here, a new resident will buy a block of land, and then borrow a friends drilling machine and just dig out their home. It was really fascinating and we learned quite a lot.

Tomorrow we head off to Uluru for a couple days and then on to Alice Springs.