Underground living quarters. The world's longest fence. And the moniker of Opal Capital of the World. This is Coober Pedy.
ON HANDS AND KNEES, I shift the crumbled earth in all directions, searching for a glimmer of hope amid the diesel and dust of a windswept opal field. All around me, long-­abandoned and thoroughly scoured opal mines can be seen in every direction, evidenced by the countless piles of discarded dirt that pop up from the earth like mutant anthills in all directions - and the 80-foot-deep shafts all around them that sink into this dry country like tunnels to China. Amazingly, there is opal here, despite the rampant dissection of this land since 1915, when 14-year-old William Hutchison first found an opal floater (the name for opal that sits on the earth's surface for hundreds of years) while on a gold expedition with his father. More amazing, though, is the fact that some of it has found its way into my pocket.

IF I DIDN'T KNOW BETTER, I'd think I'd gone back in time. But this is 2005 and the Wild, Wild West is alive and kicking - except these days, it's way, way out west. The gold rush, albeit for opal, continues to this day in Coober Pedy, a strangely unique dust bowl of a town located deep in the South Australian Outback, a sort of cross between the Old West and an X-Files episode.

Since opal was first discovered here, people from all over the world have flocked to Coober Pedy with hopes of striking it rich. In a town whose population doesn't even tip 4,000, there are, by current estimates, more than 45 nationalities represented (with Greeks, Serbs, and Italians leading the way), most of whom live in underground homes called dugouts to escape the extreme Outback heat (the temperature can easily hit 120 degrees in the summer).