Woomera, Animal Walk and Geocaching

I was joined by Christa on a morning walk around the Woomera perimeter road looking for kangaroos. In total, I saw more than 20. A few of them let us approach fairly closely (100ft), but most of them start fleeing when we were within 100-200 meters. Most of the time, they hear you approaching and will stare at you intently trying to figure out what to do. As the following pictures demonstrate, a common view of a kangaroo is of them staring back at you (or less interestingly running away from you). If you walk tangentially to them, they will often hold their ground. Walking towards them will most likely send them bounding away.
Plethora of kangaroos:

   

This was new: a couple kangaroos wrestling:

When we got back to the apartment building, there were several magpies that seemed to be trying to scare something away from under the balcony of the apartment's second floor. We couldn't see anything there except spider webs. Here is a magpie swooping up towards the balcony ceiling.

Another close up of a magpie in a eucalyptus tree next to the apartment.

On the bike back from the range yesterday, I got within 50ft of two emu. I have been looking for an opportunity to get a good shot of an emu, but photography is not allowed on the range. I was sorely tempted, but refrained from taking the photograph. Fortunately, today, there were emu across the street from the apartment and Christa and I got some good shots. Christa and I circled around them from opposite directions to make sure one of us would get close to them. Of course, she tricked me into going the wrong direction so she got the good photos...
Christa getting good photos of emus:

My "bad" photo of the emus. (I haven't seen hers, but I assume Christa got some better ones.)

Lastly, I did my first geocaching. We found a location about a quarter mile from our apartments. It was put up near the former residence of a guy who grew up in Woomera (1964-1980). To our surprise, what is now vacant desert land inside Woomera used to have a small neighborhood of houses. Knowing this, we could immediately spot where the old roads had been. I have now realized that a lot of the "undeveloped" land around Woomera was developed at some point. Right outside my apartment there used to be a road that has since been dug up:

Original photos.

Work

In case it is not obvious from the blog, we are actually here to work and not all our time is spent sightseeing. I figured I would give a brief overview of the what we are up to and how things are going.

          ,         and I are here in       , South Australia for work on             . Every day, we have to go to the blahblah to make sure that our                 is working. We also spend a lot of our time working on the        . Of particular concern is the       . When we are testing it, we have to take special care that the        is correctly             . 
The most recent set of tests have gone quite           . Though the           functioned correctly, there were some issues with       , causing us to            the                . Obviously, this has kept us quite busy.
Oh, one really awesome story:
                                                                                                                                                          
                                                                                                                                                  
                                                                                                                                                            
                                              !

Other range news:
We found kangaroo dung on our equipment one morning. Kangaroos must have come through during the night and thought our equipment was a bathroom.

Duncan spotted a baby emu. It appeared to be separated from its parents.

We had a dust devil hit our shelter. Several of us were inside when suddenly the shelter was slammed by very strong winds and dust was blowing everywhere. It lasted around 10 seconds and then we saw a dust devil receding from us.

A big storm came through one evening. During the day on the range, we had very strong winds blowing red dust everywhere. I had grit in my eyes and on my teeth. I wish we could have taken pictures of the blowing dust. In the village after work, we had medium rains for several hours which is the most I have seen here. By the following morning, there were a few puddles on the road, but the rain had soaked in everywhere else.
Clouds moving in:

Lightening inside the clouds:

The Painted Desert

A link to the higher res photos... if anybody cares...

After our visit to Coober Pedy, we continued further north to Arckaringa Homestead and the Painted Desert. We had to drive about an hour and a half on dirt roads around sunset to get to the homestead where we were staying. Before it got dark, we saw some great skies.

Upon our arrival, an older farmer showed up in his pickup drinking a beer. He charged us for our rooms (cash only, no receipts) and then requested help figuring out how to run his new washing machine. Looking at maps, his homestead was at least 40 miles from the nearest town.

It was a fun (and odd) experience. The rooms were quite small and separated from each other by little more than a wall of corrugated metal. I could hear the click in the neighboring room of someone turning on/off their flashlight. A single room:

We had picked up some food for dinner along the way. They had a small kitchen area where we could prepare food if we wanted.


We hung out around the campfire comparing notes with the Aussies on how best to toast marshmallows. Several of our fellow travelers had recently completed some rough off-roading in the Simpson Desert where they were able to average only 6mph with their vehicle.

Around 10pm, all our electricity was shut off, disabling all lights in the rooms as well as the air conditioning. I did not partake in a shower the following morning, but those that did confirmed that at best there was a dribble of cold water along the shower wall. I wish we had a shot of the grammatically incorrect sign warning us not to steal their toilet paper.

Before sunrise the next morning we dashed off to the nearby Painted Desert to watch the sun come up. Waiting...

The sun hitting the hills/mesas of the Painted Desert:

Duncan then pulled out a camping stove, coffee, and coffee cups to make us coffee. Like Hermione, he must have a bag modified with an Extension Charm. It never feels like he is traveling with much but he always has all this crazy stuff with him.

We have since seen worse, but at the time, this was the worst fly situation we had come across. The locals laugh at us and tell us that it will get a lot worse in the coming months. If the flies would just stay out of my eyes, nose and ears it wouldn't be so bad. I have squished a dozen or so in my ear by mistake. All of us have ingested a few while walking or biking.

We got in a little hiking on the hills and saw some very scenic vistas.

We continued driving around dirt outback roads the rest of the morning and early afternoon. Our first destination was Oodnadatta, a small town along the track of the Old Ghan railroad. We had breakfast and resupplied at the Pink Roadhouse.

Me doing some last minute reading of the tour books. I have been berated several times for not paying attention to the scenary from the car because I am engrossed in a tour book.

On the way back, we finally found the Dingo Fence. We had looked for it the weekend before, but never found it. The dingo fence is a 3500 mile long fence built in the 1880s to keep Dingos to the north in order to protect the sheep and cattle farms in the south. Every year, multi-mile sections of the fence are lost to storms and floods and need to be repaired as quickly as possible. On bad years, dingos can kill tens of thousands of sheep.

Duncan got this great picture of the Dingo Fence with the fly in the foreground.

Coober Pedy

In choosing the best pictures from our collection, I ended up selecting more of Christa's pictures than mine. Grrr...

We took a two day trip up to the northwest. Our first destination was Coober Pedy: the self-proclaimed "Opal Capital of the World". The majority of the world's opals are from here. Its other important industry is tourism and there are a plethora of shops and tourist destinations trying to lure you into their tours or opal shops.
A view of downtown Coober Pedy:

Coober Pedy is a town of several thousand in the middle of the desert. Opals were discovered here in 1915. The original mining was done by hand. The miner would dig a vertical shaft up to 30 meters deep. When they discovered horizontal stripes that indicated the possible presence of opals, they would start to dig horizontal tunnels through the seam.
Replica of early miner digging a shaft:

Hand dug mine tunnel:

Opal in the rough:


Just for comparison, here is a tunnel dug by modern mining equipment:

This is the display outside one of the opal mine tours. This type of truck is a giant vacuum cleaner that assists the opal miners. As rock debris is created in the mine and needs to be removed, it is vacuumed up by these trucks through a long hose and stored in the barrel at the top. The truck can then go dump the debris in one of the piles of scrap scattered all around the surrounding country side. In the back of the picture you can see piles of scrap.

Occasionally, opals make into these scrap piles by mistake. The term for searching through the scrap looking for opals is "noodling".

The opal mine tour we took:

The weather here can get really hot in the summers. After WWI, returning troops working in the mines built homes and shelters underground where the temperature remained constant.
An example of an old underground house:

About half the houses and some of the buildings today are underground. The mine museum we went to had a sample underground house: (The grooves on the ceiling are from the excavating equipment.)
Kitchen:

Bedroom:

We also went to a cool underground restaurant.
Stairs down to the dining room:

Eating lunch in the underground restaurant:

Redback Spider

A couple evenings ago, Christa spotted a redback spider on the wall outside my room. It had spun a web just under the window sill. We were able to get some good pictures with our cameras. Most of the other spiders we had seen were on the range where we are not allowed to have our cameras. [Boy, there was a great one (non-dangerous, but scary looking Huntsman spider) that dropped on Christa in the portapotty. I wish I had a picture of that one...]

I attempted to squish the Redback with a stick, but it eluded me, hiding in a crevice in my wall. The next morning, though, it was back again. This time, a shoe made quick work of it and its egg case. Generally, I have left all the bugs here alone, but this was not something I wanted near where I live.
Scene of crime and weapon:

Afterwards, I read that you need to be careful squishing spiders. If any remnants fly into your eye, it can cause a day or so of serious discomfort. Especially, take care if you think it would be fun to hit a large spider with a hammer.