South & Central Australia in a nutshell

Hello guys! Well since my last post we've covered a lot of ground. After leaving Tasmania we headed for Adelaide and hung around there for 2 days. We didn't want to stay there too long, 'cause we figure that once you've seen a few large cities in Australia you've seen 'm all... sort of. We strolled around the parklands, Glenelg beach (didn't see any Great Whites, just a plastic one in a museum), had a look around the museums, and even went to check out the famous Adelaide cricketground. It's supposed to be 'the most photogenic cricketground in the world' according to our lonely planet guide, so being tourists we couldn't miss out on that could we?

After Adelaide we left for 'The opalcapital of the world', Coober Pedy. Now this small town is smackbang in the middle of the outback in the Australian dessert... and it showed. It had a sort of western feel to it. Good fun. 2/3 of the town was actually built underground. Most of the miners there live in 'dugouts', which are basicly multiroom caves dug out by hand (the older one's) or using modern mining equipment. They had underground shops, underground churches, underground hotels, underground everything. We spent 2 nights in an underground hostel which was great fun. We took an afternoontour to get a look of the area. We passed a lot of opalminingfields (occasionaly tourists fall into miningshafts there trying to take a picture while walking backwards not looking where they are going... stupid, but true). We got the chance to do some 'noodling', which basicly is walking around an opal mining site and looking for bits of opal, what you find you can keep... I regret to say that I didn't exactly make a fortune... Thruthfully, I found not a single damn nugget... Luckely a nice Irish guy who'd been noodling a few hours that day with more succes than me offered me one of his finds which I gratefully accepted and claimed as my own :). We also got to see some spectacular landscape, most notably an area called 'The Breakaways', where curious rockformations have formed. Millions of years ago this area was covered by a massive inland sea, now since long dissapeared, the landscape a reminder of that ancient geological fact. Coober Pedy was also home to a large population of aboriginals, which made the town even more interesting.

Leaving Coober Pedy behind us, we took the greyhoundcoach to Alice Springs today. So that's where we are now. 800-something kilometers north of Coober Pedy and just about as central in Australia as you can get. We got a 3,5-day tour booked for tomorrow to go discover the magical centre of Australia, taking us to places like 'The Garden of Eden', 'Kings Canyon', 'Lost City' and ofcourse Ayer's Rock (or Uluru as the aboriginals call it), the huge red rock in the heart of Australia. Sounds great to me, I'll tell you guys all about it when we get back'

Bye bye