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To: Moominoid who wrote (67572)	8/15/2005 10:21:32 PM
From: shades	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

There are a lot of things I like about australia, first off you got that publicly traded hooker house right? And my hawaii bum friend says the beer and women pretty good there. Australian porn - man those women have such sexy voice you know. Nicole kidman, russel crowe - heath ledger - I mean we americans really seem to love us some aussie folks. All of this part of my master plan, first I am going to colorado mine school - get my education - then I am moving to either the underground city in utah or the one in australia - coober pedy fungod.com I watch beyond thunderdome way too many times as a kid and decide I want to do me some membering with an aussie chick and be her capn walker. Worked for tom cruise eh? hehe I just watched the travel channel the other day - some guy went to coober pedy and hung out - he was living my dream - soon Moo - travel.discovery.com July 12, 2005— Visiting "Down Under" takes on a whole new meaning in Coober Pedy. The name of this dusty opal mining town in remote central Australia translates roughly from Aboriginal as "white fella's hole in the ground" and that's just where you'll sleep if your travels bring you here. Living in one of the world's most inhospitable regions — a treeless, stony desert where temperatures can climb to 50 degrees centigrade (122 Fahrenheit) in the day and fall to zero (32 Fahrenheit) at night — half of Coober Pedy's 3,500 residents have dug their homes into the chalky sandstone ground to escape the harsh conditions. The moon-like landscape offers no water or natural shelter and is so desolate it's been chosen as the location for a string of apocalyptic and sci-fi films, including "Mad Max III" and "Red Planet." Even the region's Aborigines, with their legendary desert survival skills, steered clear of the area. But Europeans found a reason to stay: opals — rainbow-hued gems that can fetch nearly $10,000 U.S. an ounce and turn penniless gamblers into millionaires virtually overnight.. The first opals were found lying on the ground by the 14-year-old son of a gold prospector in 1915 and, after World War I, opal fever drew a flock of veterans returning from the trench warfare of the Western Front — the famous Australian "diggers." Accustomed to life in the trenches, the diggers initially bunked down in their mine shafts to escape the unbearable heat and then began excavating purpose-built underground homes, known as dugouts. Immigrants from southeastern Europe filled out the population in the aftermath of World War II and soon the opal fields were bustling with hundreds of two and three-man mining operations. The town today still reflects its multiethnic past, with 60 percent of the population being first- or second-generation immigrants, mainly Greek, Italian, Serb and Croat. But the promise of opal fortunes has proven illusory for many and over the past decade, residents turned to tourism as an alternative eldorado. To attract travellers taking the nearby Stuart Highway, a famed 3,000-kilometer asphalt track running through Australia's vast "red center" from Adelaide in the south to Darwin on the north coast, they opened a series of underground hotels, motels and backpacker dormitories. Some, like the quirky Experience Hotel attached to an underground Pentecostal church, were located inside abandoned mines and offer guests the added attraction of being able to hunt for opals without leaving their rooms. "There's opal running through the walls and I saw quartz in the ceiling," marvelled Jackson Cleveland, an eight-year-old guest whose fascination with rocks of all kinds led his father Michael to choose Coober Pedy for the family holiday. Hotel manager Elizabeth Hilgenga says guests aren't the only ones who profit from the precious stones the miners left behind. "We found opals when we were excavating some new rooms and it paid for new carpeting," she said. Dug deep into hillsides, with rough-hewn, chalk-colored walls and no windows, underground accommodation holds a constant temperature of about 23 degrees centigrade ((73 Fahrenheit) and keeps the noise of Coober Pedy's bustling operations at bay. "It's special, very quiet and you don't even know when it's daytime in the morning, so you just sleep on," said Regula Reimann, a 23-year-old Swiss tourist staying at an underground backpackers' hostel. About 100,000 people visit Coober Pedy each year, most of them on a stopover as they ply the Stuart Highway as part of weeks and months-long treks around outback Australia. Now I am more than likely gonna go to the one in Utah, but I may go to this one, I think the future of human development is going to be in underground cities and I want to be a pioneer moo. Let NY go up with a suitcase nuke, won't bother us cave dwellers down in our holes eh? hehe See Florida is no good for this type of development - too close to sea level. Long term this state is an economic dead end for population growth, you cant have star trek/star wars cloud cities because of hurricanes, cant build into the ground, florida so 2 dimensional you know - but population growth very possible in places where you can build in 3d.