dust anyone?

i am in the middle of nowhere. like, really. 11 hours north of adelaide and 8 hours south of alice springs, coober pedy is a proper desert and so completely isolated. the overnighter was, again, not too bad. i was sat at the front near the driver and he started chatting away to me about his family of nine children and 17 grandchildren. he was a right talker. all i had to do was say 'oh wow' occasionally and he was happy. it all got a little weird, though, when it got dark and everyone had settled in the bus and he started going on about how he used to know the adelaide mafia and be involved with gangs back in the 60s and did fighting and that. thought i was heading into my own little outback story of backpacking-killing bus drivers. but, no. he eventually shut up and i had various snoozes along the way. it was strange because i kept waking up during the journey but the view out of the front of the bus never changed - the headlights showing a straight road with flat nothingness on either side. the highlight of the whole journey was when he had to steer to avoid a dead kangaroo in the road. it's a completely other world.

the outback does seem a lot different to the australia i've already discovered. we had a long break at port augusta on the way at about 10pm and i thought i was back in america. i walked in the bus station and was confronted by a sea of seemingly miserable black faces. there was even the obligatory screaming mad lady. it made me realise that you just don't see aboriginal people in the main cities. everyone seems to be european or of european descent, certainly the people i worked with. i had a hot chocolate, that again was all watery and burned the top of my mouth - don't they get milk out here?! - and sat with my sudokus, keeping my head down. a group of white trash-type middle aged women chose my table to sit and have their tea and chips at and it was interesting hearing them talk. they talked about 'them' and how they make them not feel safe in their homes. it was so like being in america.

so i got to coober pedy at 5.30am and again they let us check in and sleep. i think my body is getting used to this non-sleep lark cos i felt like i could have just stayed up. i'm staying at an underground hostel. it gets so hot here in the summer - 50 degrees in the shade - that most people live in underground 'dugouts' where it's cooler. i'm finding it a bit claustrophobic. it's like living in a cave. i'm finding that i need the sunlight. and also, how do you know what to wear on a morning when you're 6.5 metres underground? it's just not practical, though i suppose that you can just guess that it's hot and dry. it is so isolated here. there's no phone reception so i can't upload photos i've taken yet. but, basically, everything is a rusty orange dust. and flat. reaaaally flat. it really is the desert. dirt and dust. and the bloody flies. australian flies are unlike any other flies in the world. they just don't bugger off, no matter how many times you waff them away. really irritating. there's also quite a few drunk, seemingly homeless, aboriginal people hanging around in the centre of town. well, it's not a town, more a collection of a few random dust tracks with one main road through. and dogs. i don't remember seeing a lot of that in the cities.

but people live here because of the opal. it isn't a place of big business. the people that mine are just normal individuals who stake out a claim and then either dig with pick axes in the old-fashioned way or get themselves mechanical equipment. i went on a tour of a mine yesterday and the woman, yvonne, showing us round was explaining that she was a miner and she was a middle-aged grandma-type. it's so unusual. they all do it in the hope of finding that million dollar piece. it all seems like too much hard work to me. i mean, it's incredibly difficult, dry, isolated living conditions here. there's a couple of restaurants and takeaways, a surprising amount of hairdressers and just one pub that looks well dodgy. the rest is just opal mines and tourist accommodation and dirt track. weird.

i've not been killing myself with activities. i'm too knackered from the overnighters to do that. they have a nice telly room at the hostel and i sat in there from about 4.30pm until 11pm yesterday, drinking tea and chatting with a groups of brits. it was just like being a student. we watched the full gamut - neighbours, home and away, and then random u.s. crime dramas. we drewn the line at 'dancing with the stars', though (australian version of 'strictly come dancing'). actually enjoyed it a lot. well, it was too hot and i'd already done the mine tour. there's not much else to do round here.

i'm off with the postman tomorrow. i'm dead excited about it. given that most of my journeys thus far have been through the night, i'm looking forward to meeting postman pat and doing a 12 hour round trip into the outback and see all the little communities and get a sense of just how isolated these places are. we're doing a triangle to william creek then oodnadatta and then back to coober pedy. apparently they filmed parts of mad max and priscilla queen of the desert round here so we'll get a good look at that.

and, hopefully, if it stays clear, they do an astronomy tour in the evening. they take you out to the 'moon plain' which apparently looks just like the surface of the moon cos it's flat and dry and without vegetation. they take you there cos it's out of the town lights and then they tell you all about the southern sky. i saw shooting stars and satellites for the first time whilst travelling about with jason last december in nz but it should still be pretty spectacular here.

and then i'm off up to alice on friday. as the greyhound is crap and don't go to ayers rock at the weekend, i'm having to go up to alice and then come back down to yulara on monday to see uluru and then head back up to tennant creek after that. it's all a bit of a balls up. but nevermind, i may get to hear more interesting greyhound bus driver stories.