Julie and I were supposed to be hiking the 5,000km Continental Divide Trail in the US in 2020, but COVID-19 derailed that plan. Instead, we will have an adventure in Australia, circumnavigating the country on our bikes, a distance of about 16,500km taking approximately five and a half months. We will use minor roads where possible and occasionally catch ferries across rivers and inlets to avoid busier inland routes. We will camp some of the time and stay in motels, hotels, etc, at others. There will be stretches of up to five days with no accommodation or resupply available, so we will need to be self-sufficient.

Round Australia Bike Ride - Day 092 - Coober Pedy

Day:  092

Date:  Thursday, 01 October 2020

Start:  Coober Pedy

Finish:  Coober Pedy

Daily Kilometres:  0

Total Kilometres:  9480

Weather:  Cool early, then warm and sunny

Accommodation:  Motel

Nutrition:

  Breakfast:  Scrambled eggs on toast

  Lunch:  Quiche/Meat pastie

  Dinner:  Pizza, ice cream

Aches:  Nothing significant

Highlight:  Having a good look around Coober Pedy

Lowlight:  None really

Pictures: Click here

Map and Position: Click here for Google Map

Journal:

We slept in and then walked to a nearby roadhouse for breakfast around 8:30am, followed by a walk down the main street to the Umoona Mine Museum where we signed on for the 10am guided tour.  It started with an interesting short documentary about opals and their discovery at Coober Pedy, and was followed by a walking tour, led by an old former opal miner, of two underground homes, one old and one new, and the original mine, which is no longer being worked.  The attached museum was also interesting and the whole place was very well presented.

After the museum, we went to the town supermarket and purchased our supplies for tomorrow and beyond, as well as some lunch, before returning to our room to repack.

At 1:30pm we walked across to a nearby hotel to join, with what turned out to be just two other tourists, a driving tour of Coober Pedy and then the Kanku-Breakaways Conservation Park.  The tour guide/bus driver was also an old retired opal miner, and also a former marathon runner who was keen to talk about marathoning of the 70s and 80s.  He showed us many of the quirky highlights of Coober Pedy - the underground Serbian Church, the grassless golf course, the underground house fringes of town, the street named after him - before driving us through some of the old mining areas, keeping up a constant description of what we were seeing which often featured his own involvement.

The Kanku-Breakaways were spectacular with multi-coloured eroded hills and mesas, and a fantastic view over the vast gibber plains to the north and east.  On the way back to Coober Pedy, we visited the 5300km long dog fence, which stretches across the middle of Australia to keep dingos out of the sheep country to the south.  The tour ran over time and it was nearly 6:30pm by the time we got back to town.  We decided to get pizza for dinner again (last night's was so good) which we ordered on the way back to our motel and returned to collect later.

After dinner, it was the usual packing for tomorrow's ride, while watching the first round of the football finals on TV.

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