The Outback - Coober Pedy

Coober Pedy is cool. Or more accurately hot. Or even more accurately, extremely weird.

It is a small town slap bang in the middle of the Outback. There is no grass anywhere; the streets are lined either side with dusty sand. Almost every building - the cafe, shops, the hostel I stayed in and people's houses - is underground. This is understandable, it's partly to avoid searing temperatures (apparently it was 60 degrees celcius in January), but also because it doesn't cost them anything; the cost of digging out the houses is off-set by the amount of Opal they find underground. Houses literally pay for themselves.

Everyone who lives in the town is slightly odd. I think it is either the heat or the recognised affliction 'Opal fever' that makes them this way. For example there is a bloke in the supermarket with a glass eye, that looks like he just picked up an opal off hte ground and shoved it in his eye. It wouldn't surprise me if he had done. There's also a woman who works in the pub, and keeps a pet lizard who lives behind the bar. It's a very cute lizard it has to be said, a bearded dragon, she let me stroke it and pick it up. In between serving us drinks (there was only me and a fellow traveller as customers) she kept running outside to catch moths and other insects for the lizard to eat! How about Crocodile Harry, a croc hunter who inspired the film Crocodile Dundee. I could go on.

There is a massive spaceship in the middle of town. Seriously. A lady in the shop opposite told me it was left behind by a film crew, but the way everyone is round here I'm starting to think its real...