The Flight to Coober Pedy

Ten minutes out of Adelaide you leave the tiled houses with their neat gardens and the bright green of football grounds and parks. The order of roads, roundabouts, and all the comfortable cosiness of human settlement ends and you are catapulted over the deep mesmerizing blue of St Vincents Gulf and when you make landfall the other side you look down on another world, a brutal, unremitting alien redscape – no houses, no footie ovals, just a few martian scratches in the dirt.

Miles of red dirt, miles and miles of nothing – not even tracks, roads, any sign of human presence – and those that are, look puny – tracks that faintly mark the landscape, that have to weave around natural obstacles, hills, rocks, valleys out of humble deference..

A vast, unforgiving, ageless, ancient..mysterious, land… utterly pitiless, formless, endless, changing, yet not changing..

A myriad of colours, almost surreally bright, unnaturally colourful… unfathomable space, the usual dominance of the sky for once rendered dull and one dimensional, the huge blue, almost quaint and apologetic by comparison.

Occasionally the eye is drawn to movement far below – a solitary white truck moving along a track, the huge plume of dust behind it hanging in the air like a smoke curtain, motionless in the windless air.

The land is a place of extraordinary beauty, a strange and utterly incomprehensible riot of colour. Deep iron-rust reds stain the landscape, which in turn is sprinkled with trees and spinifex that line the long winding creek beds and stream runnels that weave through the hills, wreathed in the smoky blue scrub.

The Painted Hills – so bright, and changing colour with such abrupt totality that those who first saw them were dumbstruck by the transformation – and could only meekly imagine they were painted somehow, so utter was their awe and befuddlement

Huge watery salt pans, vast inland lakes, with coastlines, and beaches.. unseen, and untrod by human foot slowly unfurl beneath us.

I gaze in awe from the plane window, on this other country, another, older, vast unspoilt natural wilderness that has changed little in thousands , millions of years, – you have to go back 120 million years ago to register any significant change, and even then it was a vast inland sea..which is what I’m here to witness.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 20th, 2010 at 1:54 pm and is filed under Posts by Bill, Tours. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.