8 things you can only do in South Australia

Coober Pedy is a town built on heat and hope, and held together by opal. When the sun made life above ground impossible, people didn’t leave. They dug down. Homes, churches, shops and hotels were carved into the hills, where the temperature holds steady and cool.

Flying into Coober Pedy gives you your first real sense of the place. Below, the opal fields are scarred and cratered, the ground puckered with thousands of mounds left by more than a century of hands chasing colour through rock. Out here, you can try your hand at opal mining yourself, walking the ridgelines and mullock heaps with someone who knows how to read the ground.

By the time you turn back toward town, you just want to be out of the sun. So, you slip through a motel door cut straight into the hillside and feel the change almost immediately. Inside, it’s dim and a few degrees kinder. You set your bag down, peel off your boots and feel your skin prickle as the heat leaves you. 

On the Goolwa coast, we measure the day by the tide and the grit that ends up under our fingernails. This stretch of the Fleurieu Peninsula marks the end of a continent, where the Murray River finally pushes out into the Southern Ocean. This constant churn of fresh and salt waters makes the shoreline a literal pantry, specifically for the Goolwa pipi - a small, sweet clam that thrives in the heavy surf.

The afternoon starts with your feet sinking into the wash, twisting your heels into the wet sand until you feel the hard tuck of a shell against your skin. You scoop them up by the handful, shaking off the sand before chucking them into a bucket to clatter against the rest of the catch. Later, you’ll lean against the railing of an old shack and watch the Southern Ocean roar while those same pipis hit a hot pan with garlic and a splash of white wine.

Ancient seas and slow-moving groundwater have been carving away at the Limestone Coast for over a million years, leaving it honeycombed with caves and sinkholes. Below the cattle stations and Cabernet vines, the earth becomes a geological maze.

In Mount Gambier, you can descend into Umpherston Sinkhole / Balumbul, where vines and hydrangeas thrive in the cool, shaded walls of a collapsed cave. Just outside town, locals leap from limestone ledges into the tea-dark water of the Little Blue Lake, a natural swimming hole in the middle of a paddock. Further inland, the Naracoorte Caves act as nature’s museum, still holding the bones of long-extinct megafauna between the layers of red silt. On a sheep farm near Penola, you can snorkel through the gin-clear water of the Kilsby Sinkhole, where sunlight pierces 70 metres down to the limestone floor. You don’t stay underground for long. But a different sense of what lies beneath the surface follows you back up.

As you head north from Adelaide, the suburbs thin and the fences fall away. Saltbush fades into dry creeks lined with ghost gums, and the air becomes easier to breathe this far inland.

In the heart of the Flinders Ranges is Ikara–Wilpena Pound. This is Adnyamathanha Country, where stories have been passed down through generations and the contours of the land itself. Here, the earth folds in on itself like a cupped hand, sheltering trails that twist through stone and silence. Standing out here, it’s hard not to think about how rare true quiet has become. It’s a silence you feel in your chest, only broken by wind through the trees and your own breath slowing. 

And when the cliffs turn to rust and you’re ready for human contact again, you might find yourself on the porch of the Prairie Hotel with a cold Coopers sweating in your hand. Someone’s telling a story as a truck pulls in off the highway. The silence is still there, just less physical.