There’s certain places that remain special to me, even when I’m no longer present. Coober Pedy, a flourishing, dry, arid land that heralded the global crazy obsession with opal, lives the men who desire and drift, digging deep into the self and reaching the mystery of it all. Have you seen those colors gleaming through that clear crystal? I thought I saw a world in it, and maybe myself, that used to hide under my untold darkness.
This place looks like Mars for real. The first time I visited this town was on my way to Uluru. After long hours of driving through a flat, arid land, it comes a monstrous bugs ate in and out of the endless dirt, leaving countless holes and bumps. You couldn’t help but wonder what was going on. Had those bugs suddenly attached themselves to this land and never left? I only stayed for one night. At the time, I wasn’t drawn to opal at all. It was just a bizarre experience for me. Who knew that later in life I would repeatedly return to this Mars-like land, as if I too had been possessed by those bugs?
Opal, one of the rarest gems on Earth, the only gemstone that can display the full spectrum of colors, can only be discovered through darkness, blood, and sweat. When you determinedly believe you can find colors in the endless dirt, you are probably no longer human but a being bitten by a bug; you work like a bug, endlessly, following only your intuition and the signals from the earth. There’s literally zero logic you can follow when it comes to finding opal. Some people might hit the jackpot and find opal in one area, while others spend years searching and find nothing. Is mining opal about money? Definitely not. It’s all about chasing the untouchable gleam. Eventually, if we put all the dirt back into those holes, we wonder again: should I have gone down there in the first place? Am I controlled, or is this my own will?
The second time I entered Coober Pedy wasn’t because I was passing through, but because of a storm. In 2021, one year after I visited Uluru, I took a leap into the very centre of myself and got completely lost in it. As I drifted through that hazy reality, I suddenly realised all of this confusion might have been caused by the two rocks I had taken from Uluru. Of course, I was scared and foolish. I saw a weather forecast saying a storm was heading towards Central Australia, and I must have been bitten by a bug in the middle of the night, went crazy and decided, let’s go return the rocks right now!
The next day I threw my belongings into the car and drove once again towards the centre of the land, thinking I could finally untie the bad omen that had been eating my brain. After a 15-hour drive, I passed through the bug-eaten land once again without stopping and headed straight for the border. When I saw police waiting at the border, I couldn’t believe this was happening to me again. Is there really some kind of voodoo magic behind this land? I couldn’t help but laughed and collapsed onto the steering wheel.. The border had closed just one hour before I got there. My stupid idea was rejected. The two rocks would stay with me until my mission was complete. I wouldn’t be able to escape my duty. That was a pretty clear message.
The storm was still coming though. I camped out in my car for a couple of nights around the border, witnessing dramatic lightning strikes across the vast opened sky, feeling stunned, standing in the middle of the desert, watching destruction come alive, played by the hands of God, and once again I surrendered to a force far bigger than myself.
My very close friend knew my situation and was worried about me. She’s the kind of person who always has a strong network of people around her. She had met an opal miner a couple of years earlier and got in touch with him, knowing he was also heading back home to Coober Pedy because of the storm. She asked if he could take me in for a while, and without a second thought he said yes. So I travelled back to the bug-eaten land—Coober Pedy.
Sitting in the middle of the desert, Coober Pedy can easily reach 50 degrees Celsius in summer. With almost no humidity, it’s one of the few places on Earth where you can live comfortably underground. That’s why there are so-called “dugouts” here, where people simply dig a home out of the dirt and live in it. Some are built like proper houses beneath the ground, some are rough like camps, and my friend’s dugout sat somewhere perfectly in between.
On the day I arrived, I drove past the town and saw a man waving in the distance from the top of a hill. I drove up towards him, passed through a gate with “Enter at Your Own Risk” written across it, and that’s how I first met my friend, with a warm smile and an even warmer hug.
He took me into the dugout. The structure was still there, but it was completely worn out. Only his room was still livable; the other rooms were slowly collapsing as pieces of the ceiling kept falling. It wasn’t safe to stay in them. Luckily, there was still a kitchen. He made us two cups of oolong tea, and we sat together on the covered veranda at the entrance of the dugout. What a strange, beautiful moment: a sip of tea, two complete strangers, starting to dig out their void.
He’d been an opal miner for over forty years. Ever since he was a teenager and saw a traveling trader’s opal collection, he had never been able to get past his obsession with the beauty of opal. He started trading opals overseas at the age of eighteen, and by twenty he was already standing in the middle of the desert, digging holes, looking for opals.
Over more than forty years, he travelled the world, found some of the rarest black opals, survived gunfights between miners, endured endless poverty and a gambling addiction. From the top of the world to the deepest, darkest corner of the earth, this man was now sitting in the middle of nowhere, laughing like a kid with me.
He showed me some of his collection and told me about the birth of opal. We talked from day to night, from the ground to underground. I lit up a candle, our eyes flushed red, the bug had taken control over us, the colours of the opal flushed through our bloodstream like thunder. I told him the story of my journey to Uluru and the two rocks I had taken. He told me the secrets hidden in Central Australia, how Aboriginal people find the truth in the shape of the Dark Emu. Once again I completely fell into the swirling mystery of that dark hole. The truth can intoxicate us even more than any substance. I slept in a pitch-black tent that night. I thought I would never wake up from that darkness again.
The next day he took me in his ute to the mine site, the first time I’d ever been this close to those bumps and holes. One false step and you’d disappear into a thirty-metre hole, no one would ever even notice your absence, you’d simply be wiped out. How terrifying is that? He handed me a shovel and told me to try to find something in the dump while he looked at the different bumps and holes, connecting different threads and trying to work out where the opal might be, which was basically like guessing which number the ball would land on in a spinning wheel. Unless you’re gambling with God, how on earth can anyone find opal? It’s a pure miracle.
He told me there’s a slang among opal miners called the “opal bug”. Once you find your first opal in the dirt, you feel that adrenaline shoot through your body, and you’ll never get off that addiction again. It’s like getting bitten by an opal bug. I laughed in awe. Yeah… bug. There are definitely bugs living in this place.
I guess I was never really sure about my first encounter with opal, whether I was obsessed with it or afraid of it. But that first opal was handed to me by my dear friend, and an innocent pair of eyes was drawn into the spinning wheel, never to get out. Ouch… I scratched the rash on my arm. It looked exactly like a bug bite. Maybe it had been hiding somewhere in my hippocampus all along, a sudden déjà vu pulling me back to those dangerous bumps and holes, chasing colors, chasing that sudden gleam in the deepest, darkest corner of the earth. I must have got bitten hard, so hard that I stayed inside the void for a very long time, sniffing, feeling my way through that pitch-black hole.
Where are the colors…?
Where are they…?
4:42pm 19th July 2026 Taipei, Taiwan
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