Into the Pitlands

After Alice Springs we had to start the real work. Danene, Collen and myself packed our 4WD with enough food to last us two weeks and headed south, into the Pitlands of South Australia. The desert is quite empty, as can be seen by this very lonely tree. Poor little guy. The entire time we were surrounded by the lovely desert landscape. My photos don't come close to doing it justice. I tried a few shots of the and these were the best.

This one is outside Imanpa, near the southern border of NT

The next one is about 14 kilometers outside Eranabella. All the communities we visited were founded in fantastic areas of the desert.

And this is Mount Conner, the poor man's Uluru. We got within 200 km of the worlds largest rock but alas we were not allowed to deviate from our path. Only one team was able to visit the national landmark, those lucky sods. Still Mt Conner is pretty amazing.

We also visited a meteorite crater in the NT which was pretty cool, but I've got no photos. It didn't really look much different from the rest of the landscape, just a couple of big dents in the ground. It was the novelty of being there that was exciting.

The roads were pretty empty and it's not really the best of places to break down. However the roads are literally littered with trashed cars. You would come across one or two every kilometre of the way.

Two weeks is a long time to spend with only two other people, even if they are as beautiful as Danene and Colleen. But they helped out by washing socks, which they enjoyed immensly. That said the locals in the aboriginal communities were super friendly. I was never lonely when I wanted to kick a footy. Even when we were ten k's out of town we came across the parents of some of the kids we were teaching and they came for a quick chat and intruduced us to all their friends We conducted science workshops in Imanpa, Amata, Ernabella and Kenmore Park. Everywhere we went we came across friendly faces. Here is one I found at Ernabella. Unfortunately due to privacy I can't publish photos of the students. We had three workshops, one was on the enviroment, one on flight and one on structures. In the structures workshops we got the students to make towers out of straws that had to hold up a container of water.
On our travels we came across quite a lot of animals, including the biggest eagles we had ever seen...

...wild horses......and cows (it was fun chasing them in the car).We also came across a camal, but alas he was camera shy.

Even though we were in the middle of the desert for two weeks there was still time for a bit of R&R.

We were even lucky enough to catch up with another team for a weekend and so we went camping.It was a good thing we had 4WD, we had to engage this fabulous feature once in order to cross a dry river bed, it was very exciting.

On the way back we stopped by Rainbow Valley, where we once again ran into Team 1. We left a nice message in their window (Team 1 sux Team 2 rocks - enlarge the photos for a better view of our handiwork). It was all very mature.

And here we are finally back at Alice, out of the dry zone, enjoying our first beer in two weeks.

Cheers Susan, Chris, and Jacqui