Time Underground at Coober Pedy, South Australia

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One of the places I was keen to visit on our recent trip to South Australia and the Northern Territory was Coober Pedy. This is an opal-mining town but is also now highly geared to cater for tourists. I'll do a second post on the externals of the area but this one is all about the underground accommodation. Not everyone lives underground but the majority of people do. Coober Pedy reaches incredibly high temperatures in the summer but underground it is always very temperate. Although it was expensive we had one night in a hotel just to experience being underground. I wondered how we'd go waking up as it is just as dark at 8am as it is at midnight. But I needn't have worried. The hotel room was very lovely with a lovely sculpture in the reception area and occasional tables fashioned from zebra stone. We did a tour of a private house, most of which had been hewn from the stone by one woman. I loved the fact that if you wanted a shelf or a cupboard you just dug one out with a pick and shovel. Unfortunately I can't remember the name of the darker rock which featured on one wall. We also visited the Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches, both of which are underground. We found the whole area quite fascinating.