Well we're back in London after our long but tiring trips back from Australia.  I went via Singapore and Erika and Marlene travelled back through Dubai and we all arrived back on Sunday.  Back into work and 20 trillion e-mails and letters etc to deal with and now for me the jet-lag has well and truly kicked in and I feel rubbish (been awake at 4am for the last two days), lucky Erika is fine!

So we'll continue with our journal from the time we spent in the Nullarbor and the third day of our desert adventures..............

Again we are awake at 6am, I helped Geoff get the fire going.  It's quite easy to do as the coals are still hot from the previous night and so you just have to put some dry twigs on, wait a couple of minutes and hey presto a new fire!  Again we pottered around the camp, making sure everything was tidy and had some breakfast.  I had a bowel of cerals for brekfast and Erika had a jaffel (sp?) with the left over rabbit stew in, which apparently was delicious.  There was cloud cover today again when we got up and it was cold with the strong south-easterly wind blowing.  Kath and Erika made the sandwiches (the pair of them should open a sandwich shop if ever they get bored with doing science!) and we got our kit together and headed out to our search site for the day at about 8.45 am.  Geoff was very excited as he got to drive the quad bike!

You can see in this picture a big pole with a 'flag' strapped to it.  We used this pole and three others like it  to mark the spots that had been calculated as where the meteorite or meteorite fragments should have landed.  This make searching much  'easier' as it gives us a point of reference that we can easily refer to as we are walking around.

Today we did box searching between where the 60 g and 100 g mass sites.  This type of searching involves all of us walking in a line between two points, once we get to the end we turn around and move along a bit and walk back then when we have done a number of these transects e.g. walking north-south or east-west we do the opposite so our total search pattern is in the shape of a box.  This is maybe a bit hard to visualise so Erika has drawn a very nice diagram to help......................

We finished searching about 2.45pm as we had done a lot of walking and we were very tired, also the cloud cover had burned off so we actually had some sun which was nice but the wind was still a bit on  the fresh side.  It might sound strange but actually doing such detailed searching is extremely tiring, both physically and mentally.  You are having to concentrate very hard on looking at the ground around you and you are constantly bending down to look at things that catch your eyes.  In addition to the heavy (in places) vegetation an additional challenge is the fact that nearly all of the limestone rocks and pebbles sitting on the ground surface are covered in black lichen,which actually looks pretty similar to fusion crust on a freshly fallen meteorite - great!!!  We also found that walking slowly is actually more tiring than if you were walking at a normal speed.  We had quite a discussion about this and Geoff said it has something to do with the fact that you are using your muscles in a different way.  I found at the end of this day that my feet were really aching and quite painful, which I was a bit worried about as I was wearing my old faithful field boots and wasn't expecting any feet issues.

I have to be honest and say I was feeling a bit disappointed as after a hard day and with sore feet I hadn't found anything, not even the tiniest tektite!  I had picked up a couple of meteorwrongs so I knew I wasn't missing anything and Geoff and Alex had both found tektites (and indeed meteorites on the first day) so I was a bit gutted.  During the day Geoff had been telling us about the caves that run under the Nullarbor - more of these in a later post - and told us how big ones will often 'blow' - if you put your hand just outside the opening you can feel quite a strong current of air coming out, which is noticeably cooler than the outside air.  As we were heading back to the Prado Geoff called me over to show me a hole that was blowing.  I was delighted he did for two reasons - one I hadn't seen a blowing hole before (!) and also just after I walked off I spotted a big tektite!!  For a split second I thought it was a kangaroo poo as they can look like tektites but I realised that it was on its own (kangaroo droppings tend to come in groups) and it was a tektite. And then about 10 metres from the big one I found its smaller brother or sister!  Typical, I find nothing when we are actually hunting and then 2 nice tektites on the way back to the car!  But this just shows you that we were always looking, wherever we were walking and whatever we were doing, you just can't help it.  Alex said that the large tektite is quite unusual for the Nullarbor - most of the large tektites have been picked up and used my aboriginal people to make tools.  I wonder whether this one was one that was missed or maybe someone hundreds or thousands of years ago found it an collected it to use later and then dropped it....................

Caroline's tektites - note this photo was taken back here at the NHM, clearly not in the field!

After heading back to the camp we all chilled out around the fire with some beers, tea, wine etc and had some snacks. Geoff cooked dinner tonight and we had a delicious Spag Bol with a special Geoff twist - red beans, which made it even more delicious.  We had quite a laugh over red wine would go in, Alex said no that it was for drinking and we had limited stocks but we put some in when he wasn't looking tee hee Erika was so impressed with all the food she decided to keep a photgraphic log of each one, so here is Geoff's lovely Spag Bol, note the red beans so maybe more a chilli/spag bol hybrid........

We headed to bed at about 8.45pm and again it was a pretty cold night so we were looking forward to getting snuggled up in our swags/tents and sleeping bags!

Hello again!

So here are Erika and my reminisces of our second day in the lovely (cold) Nullarbor.............

We woke up at about 6am and pottered around until we had breakfast at 6.30.  Geoff made some lovely porridge which is a great way to start the day, especially as it was cold, misty and drizzly when we woke up.  We spent some more time re-arranging the truck and also making sure that the kitchen area was neat and tidy.  This is very important to keep this area clean so that flies and other visitors are not attracted to this area, we don't want dingos or any other animals eating our stuff!  Another important job was to get the quad bike out which Geoff was very excited about using!

Here's the porridge in action!  As you can see we have a couple of gas stoves for cooking, as well as the fire.  Kath is making her own porridge (small pan nearest camera) as she can't have gluten (special Kath porridge!) and ours is in the big pan next to it.  We put the kitchen right next to the truck to shelter this area from the wind - we didn't want all our kitchen stuff blowing away in the almost incessant strong winds.  Kath and Erika made some lovely sandwiches for lunch and we also used some of the left over rabbit stew to make jaffels - aka toasted sandwiches.

We left the camp at about 11 am and drove up to the first site with Geoff on the quad bike and Kath, Alex, Erika and me in the Prado.  We carried out two types of searches here, line searching and radial or star searcing.  Both of these are systematic search patterns, the idea being you know exactly what ground you have covered and also that you can be confident that you have not missed any areas out.  We did not find anything at this first site so we decided to move onto the second search area.  We walkied up to the area in a line but walking at our own pace and also in a fairly random pattern.  Erika thought she may have found a meteorite but it wasn't to be - it was a meteorwrong!  Unfortunately there are rocks in this area that do look a bit like meteorites. These are iron-rich sedimentary rocks which can often be rounded in shape, have a dark brown surface and will cause the compass needle to deflect a bit - all the sort of characteristics that we expect with a real meteorite.  I said that I didn't think it was a meteorite but we logged its position with the GPS just in case and collected it to double check with Alex the next time the group got together.

This is an example of the sort of areas where we were hunting. This is one of the more tricky areas to hunt as there are lots of dense bushy areas - these are the areas where most snakes were spotted!  Hence why we called those types of areas 'snake bush'!

No meteorites this day but I found the tiniest fragment of a worked tektite towards the end of the day.  By about 4.30pm we were getting tired and our concentration levels were going so we decided to head back to the camp.  All day it had been very overcast and this makes it not very easy to scan the ground as there is little contrast - the light is very 'flat'.  Searching in these conditions is very tiring on the eyes and by the end of the day I was getting a bit of a headache and my eyes felt very tired.

We did some administration where we noted down the GPS co-ordinates of where we had searched and then we prepared dinner, which tonight was chorizo, potato, onion and tomato dish that our Michelin starred chef Prof Bevan prepared.  Again it was DELICIOUS!

After dinner we chatted around the fire, told more jokes and discussed our plans for searching the next day.  Although it had been very cloudy we did get one benefit - a most spectacular sunset, which our star photgrapher Erika captured. Note ALL THE PHOTOGRAPHS ON THIS BLOG ARE ERIKA'S AND MUST NOT BE USED WITHOUT ERIKA and NHM PERMISSION!!!!!!!!!

Another job after dinner was to go spider hunting!  As mentioned in a previous posting we had been asked by the entomologists at the WAM to collect spiders for them, so we decided tonight would be a good night to carry out the inaugural spider wrangling of this trip.  Of course this may also have been influenced by having full stomachs and a bit of dutch courage!  Spider hunting is quite easy, we walk around the camp with our head torches on and look for the sparkling eyes (lots of them!) of the spiders, then we hunt them down!  I participated by helping spot the spiders but that was it! I took no part in catching them but simply helped by shining my head torch helpfully whilst the catching was going on by Geoff and Alex!  I was very impressed with Kath and Erika - after their initial reluctance to help, by the end of the safari they were very engaged and even were helping with the catching!

After the excitement of the spider hunting and catching we headed off to our tents and swags, hopefully to get a good sleep to prepare us for the next day.

Hi All

Ok I am back on my laptop using an internet dongle thing so hopfully I'll be able to post this post successsfully and with less hassle and faff than the last one.  Erika borrowed my laptop on Monday night and reszized a load of the images so fingers crossed............

Let's see if these images work.........  Here's some of us packing/getting ready before we left for the Nullarbor on the morning of the 19th.

HOORAY SUCCESS!!!!!!!!!!!  Various boxes with food in.  Note also the fridge/freezer (called Engels) at the back.

Packing in the Monster Truck, the quad bike is strapped in at the front, more of that in a later post!

So, as I said we headed out of Perth on the morning of 19th September. Geoff and I were in the  Monster Truck and Alex, Kath and Erika in the Prado.  Monster Truck led the way as it is speed limited to 103 km/h.  We got out of town and went on the Great Eastern Highway and after leaving the suburbs of Perth we were out in the countryside.  The road runs east towards Kalgoorlie and often is flanked  by the Trans Australian Railway and the Golden Pipeline.  We stopped at Baker’s Hill for a fantastic pie (they are famous for their pies and they are DELICIOUS!) and then continued on to Coolgardie.  Coolgardie is a mining town and is located where the first major gold strike occurred in what is now called the Eastern Goldfields (an area which is still producing a large amount of gold today).  Alex and Geoff have given us quite a history of the gold mining in WA and told us that there were strikes prior to the Coolgardie strike but these were short-lived.  We turned off the Great Eastern Highway at Coolgardie and headed down the Norseman-Esperance Road.  After a long 8 hour drive for Geoff we decided to stop at the five-star resort of Widgimooltha. 

One of the 'amenities' at the Widgiemoooltha resort..............

Alex booked us some rooms – Erika, Kath and I had the luxury of an en-suite room but Alex and Geoff shared a room without a bathroom, this sort of accommodation is apparently called donga and according to Geoff ~90% of accommodation in WA is like this!  Many are in fact made of old shipping containers but these ones were purpose-built accommodation. 

From left - Dr Geoff Deacon, Prof Alex Bevan, Kath Bermingham and me sitting on our terrace at the fabulous and glamorous Widgiemooltha roadhouse resort

After a fairly good night’s sleep, only interrupted by the occasional road train hurtling past, we set off for another day of driving to our final destination – the field camp! 

This is the typical sort of scenery in the Eastern Goldfields, driving down to Norseman from Widgiemooltha.

Now this is more like the Nullarbor - note the distinct lack of trees.  However, since I was here last in 2006 it is MUCH GREENER as there has been some significant rainfall over the winter.  This is great for the farmers who have cattle and sheep stations in the region but not so great for meteorite hunters.  I commented to Geoff that when I visited first I felt that the stark and barren landscape of the Nullarbor was really quite foreboding but now with the amount of greenery around it actually looked quite appealing.

After about another 5/6 hours of driving we left the Eyre Highway and started on the dirt roads leading north and into the wilds of the Nullarbor.  This was tricky driving for Geoff especially in the truck and also as it was beginning to get dark.  I was helping to navigate using a combination of GPS and also maps etc from previous Nullarbor adventures.  Luckily I did an adequate job and we only took a wrong turning once, which I realised almost as soon as we had so we didn't get lost or lose anytime having to backtrack.

We arrived at our chosen campsite at about 9pm and it was really quite dark which is not ideal for setting up a camp but we had planned for such an eventuality with our packing and all our essential kit was easily accessible in the Prado and Truck.  The first thing we did was Kath and I helped Alex dig a firepit, this is vital as the fire provides warmth for cooking, hot water etc (obviously)!  It was getting very cold so we were very grateful that we got the fire going so quickly and also that Geoff had cut some logs at a stop we had made earlier in the day!  Clever Geoff!!

As we were so busy setting up a basic camp so we could all sleep comfortably after the long journey we don'y have any photos of us setting up the camp but we took a lot whilst we were there so I will share those with you in later posts.

See you soon and I'll post another blog tomorrow or Friday...........

Byeeeeeeeeeee

Caroline xxxxxxxxxx