Category:Travel
It didn’t take a lot of horsepower to make the holes in which we set the explosives and hydrophones – just a water pump and a couple of guys with pipe wrenches. Water was relatively easy to come by. In most cases the crew only had the dig a sump one or two feet deep and place the filtered end of the inlet hose into the sump.
After the surveyor cut his line, a ‘bridging crew’ would follow along behind and cut smaller trees to form a walkway, or bridge. Typically three poles wide and nailed together, it made walking the lines considerably easier for the rest of us and in most cases kept our feet dry also. It also meant that relatively few people were actually tromping across the jungle floor.
Most of my LVL work was to determine and map the boundary of the organic material to the first two distinct layers of sand. Consequently, most of my shots would only be sunk a couple of meters into the organic layer. The main crew, however, needed their shots placed down in to the sand – about six meters down.
Actually, the shot below is of a pretty shoddy job. If we’d done it properly, as we did most of the time, there wouldn’t have been any blow-out. Here, a large part of the energy of the charge is moving upwards as the shot hole blows out and the noise generated when the dirt falls back to the ground also degrades the signal. But when a shot goes well, there’s nothing to photograph.
It’s trickier to find the bird sitting on the wire in this image than the two caged birds in the image I posted yesterday, but it’s there. You might need to click on the image to go over to my Smugmug version and enlarge from there.
There are two birds sitting in a cage outside one of the windows here – actually there’s a second cage but I can’t see how many birds are in that one. There’s also an electric desk fan hung outside one of the windows to provide a drying breeze in case mother nature decides not to. The ragged tarpaulins and corrugated iron sheets enclose a produce/grocery store.