The guy who manages Bulls garage is an amazing character. I never did discover his name, so I’ll just call him Mr Bull, which he may very well be for all I know. He always seems to be dealing with about 5 people at once.

"Where’s Dave [the mechanic] – I need my left hand frogglegrommet fixed real quick"

"Can I take two cans of brake fluid for the station?"

"Where’s my spare wheel? – I brought it in yesterday with a puncture"

"What do you mean you don’t know how long it will take till Dave comes in. Where is he anyway?"

"Can you order in and fit an exhaust system for a 94 VR Commodore wagon, please?"

In the midst of all this, Mr Bull stoically retains his cool. How one earth he can think, let alone get anything done with all this going on? I went away with a promise that the exhaust would be here the next day. He’ll never remember to place the order, I thought, in any case it could be days on the back of some truck. I turned out to be wrong on both counts.

With muffler blowing, I haul the caravan into Bert’s workshop. I have my ideas on how to fix the broken bracket and make it stronger so it won’t happen again. Bert has better ideas, so repelling my fears of bush mechanics. While he starts work with welder and grinder, I get my bike out of the car and start to repair it. The wheels are bent.

"Bert, is there a bike shop in Coober? I need a spoke spanner."

Bert shakes his head "Hmm . . . Not really . . . I suppose you could try the Mobil station up the road"

I drive up there and ask the man serving at the counter.

He looks at me incredulously "A spoke spanner?" He doesn’t add "You must be joking!" but his expression says as much. Without a spoke spanner I cannot fix my bike. What am I going to do?

Still looking straight at me, he reaches under the counter, pulls something out, and bangs it down. A spoke spanner!

"$2" he says without the slightest change of expression.

As I leave the shop with the required article grasped firmly in my hand, I realize that these people here have a style of working and a type of humour that I may just be beginning to comprehend. Both are highly effective.

Half an hour later the caravan bracket repair is finished. It is an excellent job done at a very reasonable price. Next item, the car back window. Bert sends me to John Braun’s workshop, but when I get there the place is closed. I note the phone numbers on the sign and 10 minutes later John is telling me on the phone he’s had an accident, has second degree burns on both hands, and is recovering at home, totally unable to work. Oh no! Why do these things keep happening to me? The only windshield man in a small town and he’s going to be out action for days – perhaps weeks!

"Do you have a window in stock, John? Maybe I could get someone else to fit it?"

"Not for the wagon, no. Not in stock, but if we can get one, my brother in Adelaide could do it. I’m hoping he can come up to help me out. I’ll phone him again and see if he can bring one with him"

"When would that be?"

"Monday. Do you want to phone me again Saturday afternoon to see if I have managed to arrange this? Would this be OK?"

So this is how the second-degree burn problem was overcome. Everyone was so helpful that I realized that there was absolutely nothing to worry about. Everything would be done in a few days. I went back to the caravan site in my wounded car and completed the repair to my wounded bike. With that fixed I could now leave my car at the various repairers and still have mobility.

I paid $27.50 and took the guided tour put on by Janis, the Greek who owned and ran the campsite I was staying at. I’m not sure how much of what he told us was true, but he drove as all over town and herded us in and out of here and there, keeping us fully occupied and totally enthralled for 5 hours. It soon became apparent that in Coober that there wasn’t much that you couldn’t do. I was particularly impressed by the lack of grass. Not a green blade to be seen from horizon to horizon. When Janis said he was taking us to the golf course everybody laughed. When we got there, sure enough there was a sign proclaiming "18 holes $10.00" so it must be a golf course – and it was – without any grass at all! The tees consisted of a piece of green matting used in indoor football pitches, the greens were level patches of sand treated with diesel to stop the sand blowing away, and the bunkers seemed to be the remains of small open-cut mines.

We were taken out to a mining area to see the action. These areas are quite dangerous with unmarked mineshafts, tunnels that can and do cave in without warning, powerful, crudely maintained machines with electrical cables carrying thousands of volts snaking everyplace. The greatest single cause of lost revenue is tourists with cameras walking backward "to get everyone in" then falling down mineshafts. There are warning signs all over the place graphically depicting traps for young players in Coober. To my surprise, we were let off the bus to wander freely around an area that I would classify as seriously hazardous. Then I realized that of course Janis had collected the money before we started the tour. It wasn’t long before we had our first near-casualty – Janis himself! He came close to cardiac arrest when I, a fully experienced speleologist from my younger days, tried to see if chimneying down a 1,000 m (3,000 ft) mineshaft was feasible. When he had regained his composure, we had him show us how to "noodle" for opals. Noodling is searching through tailings to see if anything worthwhile has been missed. I found a couple of big, deeply lustrous blue opals, but threw them back because I had no means of carrying them, and to put them in my pockets would ruin the shape of my designer jeans.

The underground "buildings", or dugouts as they are called, are fascinating. Being winter it was very cool in Coober but in summer temperatures can go up to 55° C (125° F) on the surface. This isn’t generally advertised because it might put tourists off and they have become a significant source of revenue. Underground, temperatures remain at a fairly constant 25° C (70° F), so you don’t need heating or air-conditioning. Dugouts started as miners living in the workings of their mine. Now, people make dugouts for houses, shops, hotels, churches, and so on. Janis took us to a church – it was beautiful! The rock is sandstone and has a lovely streaky red quality. There is no need to paint the walls or ceilings, just a coat of sealer is needed to stop the dust. There used to be mining for opals in the town itself. This got out of hand with people tunnelling under their neighbours’ properties, roads, and so on when they were following a "slide". A slide is a fault line in the strata, which is where opals are found. Subsequent cave-ins caused chaos (have you seen a movie called Paint Your Wagon?), so now tunnelling is restricted and closely controlled for the purposes of housing, etc only. Rates are levied on the number of rooms for one thing. People with a "3-bed" home may in fact have 16 or more rooms because they found opals when building, so they kept going, but never let the town shire know or they would have had a big rate bill!

I used to think that Western Australia was dry until I got to Coober – it’s about as wet as the bottom of a parrot cage. Apparently it only rains about 2 days in June every 3 years or so. How the original settlers managed I dread to think. Presumably they carried all their water in. Because we’re talking 1800’s, they would be using horses. Since these need water too, the logistics must have been horrendous. Now, the town’s water comes from a bore about 25 Km (16 miles) north of the town. It is too salty to drink, so it is piped to the outskirts and run through an osmosis desalination plant. I never found out how this works, but apparently it is very expensive to run. Water use is controlled closely. Nobody has a lawn or flower garden here! When I first arrived I was surprised to have to put in 20¢ for a 3-minute shower. Now I see why and, all things considered, I think they have done marvels to make life so "normal" in Coober. After Janis had explained all this, he then surprised us by taking us from the desalination plant to the other side of town.

You will remember me saying that In Coober there wasn’t much you couldn’t do. Well you can play Aussie rules football here. Not only that, but you can do it on grass! Yes, the real green stuff! Coober boasts not only a golf course, but also a full size oval. For those of you who don’t live in Australia, an oval is not oval at all here, but rectangular and covered in grass. It’s what I would call a sports field. I have often wondered about why they call them ovals here, and the best explanation that I can come up with is that Australians love (and are very good at) cricket. Since cricket is played on oval areas of grass then, ipso facto, any area of grass must be an oval! Coming back to Coober Pedy, South Australia, this oval had cost several million dollars to build - I can’t remember how much – I was so stunned by seeing an oasis of green in the middle of a dry desert, that my attention failed me at this part of the tour. Anyway, when you looked at all the trouble they had had to go to make it, you could see why it hadn’t come cheap. First of all, they had to lay a substrate of sand on the desert surface for drainage purposes. Then a layer of topsoil, imported presumably from Adelaide or someplace since I hadn’t noticed any topsoil locally. The grass would need to be watered every day, so the whole oval was reticulated. There was a ditch around the oval where the used water was collected and reused to irrigate some trees (another rarity in this part of the world).

Another highlight of the tour was the visit to The Breakaways, about 40 Km (25 miles) north of Coober. I would never have found this on my own since it is not shown on any map that I have. The Breakaways is a starkly isolated corner of the Pedirka Desert where you stand on the edge of a plateau and overlook a huge area of desert with hills and flat-topped plateaus. It is not hard to think that you are somewhere on planet Mars. I set my camera to wide-angle and took a shot, then realized that the scale of the panorama would require about 5 such shots all joined together to take it all in. All I can say is that you’ll have to go there yourself to see what I mean. Movie producers obviously saw the similarity with Mars too because a number of science fiction movies have been made out here. In the centre of Coober there is a public toilet looking suspiciously like a space ship. That’s because that’s what it is. A space ship used in the making of a movie at The Breakaways. What a creative way to recycle old space ships! On the way back we saw the dog fence, which keeps the Dingoes where we want them. This shares the same claim to fame as the Western Australian rabbit fence – it is also the longest fence in the world! Perhaps Australia should claim a world record – having the highest number of "the longest fence in the world's"!

We went into a museum. This was situated underground and displayed a real opal mine and a real house. There was also a movie theatre and we saw a documentary on how opals are formed and how they were first discovered here. No need to draw the blinds in this cinema!

A few days later I took a more specialized tour of a mine conducted by the mine owner/operator himself. This was excellent and he showed us how to drill and use explosives and explained how picks were superseded by explosives that in turn have been superseded by tunnelling machines. We discussed the relative merits of ICI Nitropil versus sugar and weedkiller. When he asked me how I knew about this and I explained how I used to enjoy blowing trees up as a schoolboy, he expressed surprise that I still had two hands. Another interesting exercise was using divining rods to search for opals. You don’t actually detect the opals themselves, but the slides in which you hope to find them. Since there is no water in the desert, if your divining rods move, then it must be a slide. I had never done any divining before and was fascinated to experience it for myself. Our tour guide said that it was quite unusual to find anybody who could not divine. Everybody in our party could do it. Some were more sensitive than others.

On Monday morning I took my car down to Bulls garage. The exhaust was now in stock but Dave the mechanic, who I now discovered was Bert Shelton’s brother, was doing yet another callout. I wanted to check with John Braun about doing the back window, but was politely reminded that in this town everybody knew everybody else and their business, so please leave the car, go away, and don’t come back until about 4:30 when everything would be done. I spent a most entertaining day cruising around the town on my bike, visiting underground exhibitions, going to the library to check my email, and so on. At 4:30 I tracked down my car, now fully restored to its former glory, to John’s workshop where he wrote out an invoice with bandaged hands and explained how it all happened. We spent half an hour drinking coffee and swapping stories about how we had each had poured petrol over ourselves and then set fire to it at various times.

For small town, Coober has an amazing number of churches. Anything from Roman Catholic to Greek Orthodox denominations is catered for. The churches themselves are mostly underground. While checking out my groceries at the IGA store, I fell into conversation with a charming person, who identified himself as the pastor of a church I had noticed near the school. We chatted as the operator packed his groceries. He said that his flock extended out several hundred Km and he was setting out that day on a trip to one such outlying district. He had a small child with him, standing in the shopping cart, but I couldn’t determine whether it was a boy or a girl because s/he was dressed in both blue and pink. Small children all look the same to me, and without colour-coding I don’t stand a chance.

"Will you take your wife and our little friend here?" I asked.

"Oh yes. The whole family will come. We have eight children."

I was flabbergasted. He didn’t look old enough. "Eight!" I said "Have you thought about getting a television?"

He laughed and so did everybody else around the checkout. I decided at this point that I had probably said enough and that a quick exit would be diplomatic.

South Australia has an excellent policy of providing free Internet access to the public. Three machines in a computer room in the library were allocated for public use. The library was combined with the secondary school, an arrangement that struck me as being a very sensible use of limited resources in an outback town. Every two days or so, I used to pop in to check my email, so I became acquainted with the staff there. One morning a middle-aged lady in business clothes whom I had never seen before was working at a computer assigned for staff use, when I came in and sat down to use a public one adjacent to her. We nodded to each other and later struck up a conversation. She was in charge of the library amongst other duties. I expressed my appreciation of being allowed to use the library facilities so freely and remarked that the friendly, laid-back atmosphere in Coober favourably impressed me. She said Yes, it was laid back – too much so, and then went on at considerable length about the failure of firms in Coober to follow normal business protocols, how the people coming here to mine were not following Work Safe practices and procedures, and how this had to change – and the sooner the better.

I should explain at this point to non-Australian readers about the government’s Work Safe initiative. This is a fairly new program which purports to cut down accidents in the workplace, thus saving lives, reducing lost working hours, hospital costs, etc, leading to a situation where nobody ever gets hurt, no employer loses a working hour, and everybody lives in a happier, healthier, wealthier, utopian world. The way it works is something like this: Suppose you cut your finger while preparing a snack in the lunchroom at work. According the Work Safe procedures, you are required to immediately abandon your lunch and seek out the qualified, certificated first-aider assigned to your floor/section/whatever. After administering first aid you are to be taken to the nearest hospital outpatient department for treatment as a precaution against AIDS, lockjaw, beriberi or anything else you could conceivably get. On return to work, you and the first-aider must then fill out accident reports in triplicate, attend an interview with the manager where working practices about sandwich-making are reviewed and alterations drafted for later submission to the firm’s Work Safe committee. Work Safe reaches across as many areas of human existence as the myriad of people in appropriate government departments can think of, and the list is growing. Youth volunteers such as Scout leaders must attend courses and obtain certification to insure that they are fit and proper persons to be in charge of young people. So it goes on.

Coming back to the computer room of Coober Pedy library, the lady sat next to me went on about procedures and ethics and safety protocols and the local population who must be taught that the shortcuts and slipshod methods that were prevalent here were to be stopped forthwith . . . She went on and on and on. I made soothing noises to no avail. Was she married, I wondered? Possibly widowed. Perhaps her late husband had hung himself to escape the onslaught. The drivel continued as I tried to concentrate on my email. What a load of bureaucratic bull! I suppose that every organization has at least one person like this. I had just found Coober’s finest.

You will recall that I said it only rains in Coober for two days in June once every three years. Well, guess what? We had one of those days on my last night there. How do I do it? Well, I have this special talent you see . . . It started at about 5:00 am with a low rumbling sound that I at first thought was a 757 taking off from the Royal Flying Doctor airstrip. This turned out later to be thunder and was accompanied by intermittent light rain that carried on and off all day and completely messed up my plans for a longish cycle ride. As evening darkness fell, lightening started up to the north. And what lightening! Forked lightening with arms branching out left and right seconds after the main arc had struck. Crack! Pow! Then a jagged, diagonal strike across the whole north sky. A little later a multiple flash, flash, flash-flash followed by a long rolling sound then a loud BANG which made you jump. So it went on. Variations in style, timing, brightness, and loudness. All fantastically spectacular. Then the rain started. Quite gently at first. Then a pause, then more rain, another pause. It went on like this for about an hour. By this time it was dark. Then it happened! An ultra-bright multiple FLASH, FLASH-FLASH and almost instantly a frighteningly loud CRACK, CRACK-CRACK. Then the rain. A light shower on the roof of the caravan then ROAR! It was hammering down. I couldn’t hear myself think over the intense sound of my caravan being deluged. More flashes, the bangs muted by the roaring of the rain on the roof. I had never been in my caravan in anything other than a light shower before. Would it keep out the rain? So far so good. The storm continued with full force for at least another hour and a half. During this time I went to bed, lying in the dark being entertained by the free spectacle. Nothing like a cracker of a thunderstorm. I was pleased for the waterproof roof and warm, cosy, dry bed. Eventually it tailed away. I fell asleep, awoke to a flash and bang, then went to sleep again until dawn.

What a night it had been! The next day the desert dry town I had entered was transformed into a rain-sodden morass of red mud and puddles. Everything was soaked. I packed up the caravan, hooked up and hit the road. North on Stuart Highway to Ayers Rock and Alice Springs. Was it only a week I had been here? It seems like longer. Goodbye Coober Pedy and all the charming and fascinating people I have met here. Goodbye. One day I hope I will return.