By: Denys, (photos by Brady)

From Left to Right: Laurie, Denys, Andy and Brady.

We’re now up in Coober Pedy in a hotel that’s carved into a sandstone hill, and you can still see the grooves the tunneling machine left in the wall. We just finished a great dinner after a ten hour drive along the Stuart Highway from Adelaide. A couple days ago we finished our 4 wheel drive skills training course. It poured rain and made for a great day of off-roading. The course was a great experience and I now feel MUCH more comfortable and safe driving the utes in the bush. On the drive out to the off-road track I was disappointed when Laurie, our driving instructor, came on the radio saying that there were 5 kangaroos off to the right because I missed those particular kangaroos. I thought I had missed my chance at seeing any kangaroos. I could not have been more wrong. At the time I lost count we had seen about 80 kangaroos.

Mike Hatch testing the TEM equipment
prior to leaving for the field.

We spent the next day in an Adelaide park with our project partner Michael Hatch (University of Adelaide) testing the TEM systems prior to our departure. The systems were working great and we headed out to Zonge Australia headquarters where we met with Kevin Cahill. At Zonge we loaded all the vehicles with the gear and readied for the trip. After an early morning we hit the road and headed up to Coober Pedy. The drive was long and straight but really entertaining.  We drove past the Flinders range, and Pink Lake. We’re off to the APY lands tomorrow, and we’re really excited to get started on our geophysical data collection.