We arrived on the small jet and were greeted by a bunch of flies. They were constantly waiting for us as we walked around town over the next few days.

Dinner was at Tom & Mary's, a small Greek restaurant on the main drag. Actually, when you think about it, all of the restaurants in town are small, thriving on the tourist trade, surviving on the locals. The tourist season had not yet started when we arrived, I think it was going to be about a month or two before it hit high gear.

Coober Pedy Sunset

We walked up to the Big Winch, where we sat and took some sunset pictures overlooking the town.

Dingo Fence

The next day was our scheduled tour of the town. It took us to see a church that was inside one of the hills in town. This idea is duplicated in a number of home and businesses in town. Considering the fact that it gets up to 150°, they say, in the summer, and air conditioning

Salt and Pepper Formation

a house in that heat is very expensive, staying underground is a very wise move.

We also got to see mines from a distance, the Breakaways, the Dingo Fence, and a golf course.

We tried to send email from an internet cafe, but we didn't have much luck. It wasn't set up for people who were using email other than HotMail or Yahoo. We could read our mail, but not send any.

And dinner was at Tracy's restaurant $16 dollar filet steak that were quite good and would have cost $7 more back in the states.

Thursday was the last day in CP. Since our day was compressed, we decided to eat lunch at the Hotel's restaurant. This decision was to have echoes throughout most of the rest of the trip.

Eating at the restaurant was a trio of folks: two women and a man. Eavesdropping on their conversation with one of the members of the tour we took yesterday, we discovered that one of the ladies was a playwright who was in the country to attend the opening of her play "Jezebel and Me" in Sydney. While in Sydney, we had watched a morning program interviewing the lead actor in the play. It turns out that the lady had flown over to Australia with her female friend in tow. When they got here, they decided they wanted to travel the country. To help them do that, they called a chauffeur they knew and told him to fly out to meet them in Sydney. He did and he'd been driving them across the country when we met them in Coober Pedy. They were planning on continuing their loop about the country and end up back in Sydney. More about them in later installments....

Next stop, Adelaide.