tourism. The signs are everywhere, literally: Opal Mine, Opal Cave, Backpackers Cave, Opal Factory and Opal Centre. The Red Sands Restaurant and Nightclub sits above a Mobile gas station-roadhouse-opal shop. The Desert Cave, opened in 1989, offers luxury underground rooms.
Still, the offerings rarely keep visitors beyond an overnight stop between Adelaide and Alice Springs. A short distance outside town is Australia’s own Great Wall, the "dingo fence," a 9,600-kilometre barrier that runs the length of the country, from sea to sea.
Another attraction featured in all the brochures, is the Big Winch, which, upon even a cursory inspection, turns out to be just that, a really big winch.
Coober Pedy’s cave homes are far more engaging. Boring machines can dig a four-bedroom abode in a day. The cost is 20-30 percent less than conventional housing, but the real saving comes in energy. While several air conditioners struggle to cool a normal house to under 30 degrees in summer, Coober Pedy’s caves remain a comfortable 25 degrees, year-round, free of charge.
In many ways, housing construction is a cracker-jack trade here. Mr. McLeod tells of a friend who built a 17-room house. "He found enough opals during excavations to pay for the entire place."
Indeed, luck - good and bad - is what brings most people to Coober Pedy. For gamblers and gits, it's a second-chance city, the last exit on the road to nowhere.
Ron Gluckman is an American reporter who is based in Hong Kong, roaming around the wild parts of Asia for a number of publications, including the Wall Street Journal, which ran this piece in the summer of 1995. Mr Gluckman has a warm spot for wacky tales and odd characters, a quirk that dates to his reporting days in the unconventional Alaskan Bush. However, aside from North Korea, which he rates as, "easily the five weirdest places I've ever been," Mr Gluckman has never been anywhere quite as wacky as Coober Pedy - unless you count Japan's Indoor Beach.
For other Australian laughs, turn to his story on Vietnamese boat-person comic Hung Le and the Melbourne Comedy Festival.
The photos on this page, and much of the scanning for this site, are by David Paul Morris, an American photographer in Hong Kong who often travels with Ron Gluckman. For other examples of Mr Morris' work, turn to the Urge to Merge, Melbourne Comedy, Hung Le, the Man Who Beat Beijing, China Beach and Spears of Death. Or visit his new web site: www.davidpaulmorris.com