Opal, opal, opal... must be Coober Pedy!

The surroundings of Coober Pedy look like on the moon a bit, because hundreds of people dig holes to get the opals. 

Digging shafts

In aboriginal language the name of this town says it all already:

And indeed you can feel the opal fever nearly on every corner of this desert town.
Since it is getting very hot in summer, up to 50 degrees C, the people here leave in the so called "dugouts" and these are the usd to be shafts, where the opal has been dug out. We spent some time underground to get the feeling of the mining.

Under this hill there is an opal mine

Underground corridor in the Umoona museum

Typical man: sleeping with a beer bottle;)!

In the Umoona museum (underground of course) you can see that everywhere here millions and millions years ago there used to be a huge ocean. There is a fossil found not far away from the town and the policeman who found it in the 1930s first thought that it was an old car tyre;-) If that was just a shell fish imagine how big the other predators were??

Fossil mistaken to be an old tyre

After such amazing and exhausting trip (infromation booster like hell) we needed some food. Coober Pedy has citizens from 86 countries and of course there are some Polish and Germans here, which influences the food offered in the local supermarket. So we went for the sauerkraut (from polish company KRAKUS!) and some German sausage.

The next day we still had some sauerkraut left and Doro felt like cooking polish cabagge soup kapusniak. Well, all good, but even for Doro it was too sour, and have a look what Peter has to say:
  

Another time we got rain, even though we are in the desert and the maximum amount of rain per year is 175mm... And actually we got almost all of it the last 3 days!! So what we do we spent a lot of time in coffee shops, watching the local didgeridoos:

We would like to get back on the road again tomorrow, but since it should rain again we will have to wait until Sunday to start again. Within the next 700km we should get to the Ayers Rock or Uluru as it is called with a few stops in road houses. It will be very interesting trip getting us closer to Darwin:)
Have a nice weekend!

Port Augusta to Coober Pedy: Outback!

We started on Friday with VERY heavy loaded bikes and loads of food. Okay, 4 litres wine are also with us ;-)

And then we saw the table with the distances to the next towns we are cycling to... Crazy... (we? Or the distances? We are not so sure;-))

After we have left Port Augusta, we had a good tail wind, great weather and beautiful views. Everything was perfect on our first day of crossing the continent!

Most probably you all have seen an oversized transport on the highway. We believe that everything you (and we :-) ) has beed topped by this one:

Have a look at Peter how small he is compared to the road train AND the mining machine that it tra nsported!! Crazy! You can see again, everything is huge here in Australia!

After having cycled 110km we have found a great place for a bush camp, had a camp fire and had a delicious meal: kangaroo steak!

And once again, the sunset was just amazing:

The next day started with bacon and eggs prepared on an open fire :).

The ride was fine for the first hours then the wind direction changed and we faced a heavy head wind and we always got distracted from beautiful landscape such as a huge salt lake.

The nature around us looks from the first view a bit monotonous but once you are in there it is just awesome. The great wide open is not jusr a song from Tom Petty. Check it out

In the evening on Saturday we arrived Woomera a town with trees and everything but in the middle of nowhere. The town actually is famous for the former Australiean rocket ambitions. Still impressive what they have done there. 

After getting up early in the morning we bought some bread in the one and only Woomera store and pedaled off towards Gembaldon about 120km further north-west where we hoped to get to the roadhouse.

Here some impressions from our cycling throughout the day;

 

 

 

Yes, we get more and more flies, so that Peter decided to use his fly net for the first time during our stay here:

After 5 days of cycling we got to our destination: Cober Peedy today:

We will sty a few days here and we will be back with some opal mining stuff;-)

Preparing for the crossing of the continent!

We arrived safely in Port Augusta after 24h spent in the Indian-Pacific train. We enjoyed the trip a lot and relaxed after 5 exhausting days we had before! 

We crossed the dessert and basically that was the view we had the whole day!!!

In Port Augusta we met some lovely people: 2 bikers from Malaysia, Polish motorbiker from Sydney and Kevin, great Australian man telling us incredible stories about living in the Outback. Yesterday we cooked a meal and had a few wines together! 

Now we are preparing for a start tomorrow: we will go to Darwin, we will have 3000km to go, so we have to take enough food, vitamins, spare parts etc. the next bigger city is 570km away, until then we need also to take out food with us;-) This time we go shopping together;-) 

We will be back from the opal mining city Coober Pedy, we think they should have internet there, so stay tuned! 

From Esperance to Kalgoorlie

Sad to say good bye to the coast line? Yes, on one hand but also excited to cycle into the outback. 

The last day in Esperance we went to the dunes there:

We will also soon leave Western Australia, we have booked a ticket for an Indian-Pacific train. The journey will last 24hours and will lead through the Nullarbor, a natural barrier between South Australia and Western Australia. There is also a highway connecting these 2 states, sure there is. Still we save our energy for cycling in the outback and take the train hoping for great sun rise and lovely views from the train without caring about the wind direction and if we have enough food and water with us:-)

But to reach the next train station was over 400 km, hm... The distances are different to the ones we are used to in Europe.

The night before we left Esperance we were pretty excited because it seemed to be an easy ride since we expected an nice tail wind and sunny and warm conditions.

As we crowled out of our tend the sun smiled on us and it it looked like the wind came from the sea as the days before.

We packed our luggage and soon after we hopped on our bikes. As soon we turned away from the sea side the wind started to blow into our faces. Ok, thought thats the way it is lets stay optimistic and just do it. During the day the wind got stronger instead of calming down. We decided to cycle behind each other and change position every kilometer to ensure both of us got some slipstream.

Well this kind of cycling was from now on our preferd way to cycle. The wind was against us for the next 400 km and got worst day by day.

Apart from the conditions the ride was really nice. The full green coast line changed after a couple of kilometers already into red dry bush land.

Here some impressions.

The night sky got brighter and brighter as more we cycled inland unfortunately we canot show it you just have to belive it. The stars above Australias outback is someting we will never forget.

Most of the times we stayed beside the road overnight hidden at some nice spots and had bush camps. To show you how we manage our time after the ride please see the next pictures.

The day before we reached Kalgoorlie we entered a mining region. Our impression was there is not much untouched soil left. It looked like everywhere are human traces even though nature has captured most of it again.

The last day cycling to Kalgoorlie then was very short in distance but the head wind slowed us down that much that we needded more then 3h for just 32 km.

Nevertheless we made a short dertour to a very large gold mine lookout called the super pit.

Check it out.

We are now leaving Western Australia after having cycled 2300km.

See you again in South Australia just a 24h train journey. We will also be further away from the most of you in terms of the time zone! Changing the state means a time difference of another 1,5h and of course we get 1,5h closer to our friends in New Zealand;-)