Coober Pedy, a town in the Northern part of South Australia is easily one of the ugliest and strangest places I have ever been in my life – and I loved it. It’s the main source of Opals for the world and thus a mining town. However, it’s also in the desert and painfully hot, so people there dig in to the side of the hills and live in caves. Seriously. The cave keeps it constant 70ish degrees inside year-round, and the caves have all the plumbing, electricity and furniture of any normal house anywhere. We stayed in a hostel that was a cave – and drank in a cave bar – and it was wonderful. The picture above is taken from the porch of my hostel and shows ugly downtown Cobber Pedy, with the homes are buried in to the hills you see in the distance. That weird, big metal thing is a spaceship from some movie; lots of movies were filmed in the area (including Mad Max III) because it is utterly desolate and looks like another planet.