Red Centre to Adelaide

Dinky the singing Dingo
Outback Border between Northern Territory and southern Australia
Border between Northern Territory and southern Australia

The breakaways
The breakaways
Different coloured sands that were spread throughout the region
Close up to one of the feature areas near the breakaways
Breakaways

White mounds near the breakaways

Our underground dorm room in Coober pedy

My room, i was all on my lonesome
Dog fence
Dog fence - the largest fence in the world. It prevents Dingos getting into the farms in Southern Australia
Another room next door to ours that was really creepy
Dorm Underground house
Underground house
Mine entrance
Mine
Mine


Night out at the underground bar
One of our guides and a weirdo miner

One of the perched salt lakes that litter central Australia

To get back from the outback, by flying would have cost something like 800 dollars??? It only cost 200 hundred and something to get there!!!! Qantas have a monopoly on the route from Brisbane to Alice springs and try to rip you off something rotten.

I decided to do a two day tour called the boomerang from Alice Springs to adelaide, and then fly back a day later to Brisbane for my next flight to Bangkok. The arrangements were a bit tight and so if anything was delayed or went wrong, then i would miss my flight to bangkok.

The tour was basically just a fast road trip that got us from Alice to Adelaide which was a hell of a long way. We were driving for about 12 hours a day through endless outback. There was about 15 of us in a really comfortable bus with reclining seats. We would stop every few hours for a refuel or for a stretch of the legs. We had two tour guides as one of them was in training.

Not soon after leaving Alice we had a stop for breakfast at a road house. The road house was the home to Dinky the singing dingo. He howled the way a dingo does whilst playing some notes on the piano!!! It was a really funny sight and had us all in stiches. He is actually quite famous and there is a question in trivial pursuit about him!!

Our next stop on the first day was a really lovely spot called the breakaways. They had been formed the same way that Uluru had been. They were beautiful, much more so than Uluru. We took the bus off road for a while and really raced around the dirt tracks to get a bit closer to the mountains. The off roading was good fun and the bus really good take a good hiding. It wasn't long then before we reached our overnight spot at Coober pedy. Coober pedy is the worlds centre for opal mining and some 95% of opals are mined from the vicinity of Coober. Due to the climate, most houses are made underground. They are usually formed by using dynamite and blowing huge rooms into the soft, yet strong rock. There are no supports anywhere.

The Town draws a lot of people from around the world and (I think) up to 30 nationalities are represented in the town. We were staying in a dorm room underground. The room had a comfortable temperature and felt a bit like a hospital. After settling in we went for a tour of one of the mines. The tour was really informative. We even got to go into a real home to see what an underground house looked like.

In the evening we all went out for a meal at an authentic pizza house and then onto one of the towns bars. This one was underground and full of sleazy miners. You could tell that the town is made up of mostly men!!! Me, two girls and the two guides ended up drinking far too much. We were up till the wee hours even though we had a early start!!

I overslept the next day and no one had bothered to wake me. I therefore ran around like a headless chicken whilst everyone waited for me. Nice. I had a horrific hangover for pretty much all that day. We stopped a few times on the second day. We saw the worlds longest fence which keeps dingos out of southern austalian farms, a perched salt lake - one of many that litters central Australia, and Australias longest pier (which wasnt that interesting at all). Needless to say I had an early night when we reached Adelaide.

Adelaide was a nice city. It had some really lovely old buildings around the university. There wasn't much else to see and so i thanked my lucky stars that I only had one day there. It also rained for most of the day which meant that I dont have any pictures!!!

I caught my flight to Brisbane and got there pretty late.