Rein checking in –
“I realise that we haven’t even finished the write-up of our epic road trip, but we’ve been here now two weeks and we’ve had so many experiences, I thought I’d better start recording them now before they disappear in the big cloud of memories from our sabbatical. The road trip account will have to follow at a later stage. It is hard to keep track with our blog, particularly as it is so hard to find some downtime and internet access at the same time.
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Mornington Research Camp;
this is the central kitchen and place that we called home for about three weeks |
There is always something that needs doing here. As I am writing this, Simon and the rest of the crew are busy sorting through the load that was delivered this morning by the food truck. We get our daily food delivered here for about 25 people once every fortnight and that then needs to be distributed item by item to the individuals that ordered it. Not quite the same as hopping over to your local supermarket for your daily groceries… It is a bi-weekly flurry of activity with people relishing in the new supply of their favourite things or disappointment with stuff that didn’t come through (such as all the fruit in the last shipment, so people are now attacking the stack of apples and oranges that have finally arrived – unlike the coffee for the second shipment in a row
L).
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The crew for our first survey;
just before we set off for 6 days in the bush |
But we came here to work, not to eat… Our first week here saw us going out with the crew to remote Marion Downs (even more remote than Mornington Station) to go trapping. While Marion is only about 170 k. away from here, it took us almost two days to reach it. Underway we got “bogged” (the Australian term for getting stuck with your car) on the rough tracks so we had to unexpectedly put up our tents half way. We were the first to make it to Marion since the “Wet” (there are only two seasons here: the Wet (roughly from November through to May) and the Dry) and we found that most of the track had been washed away by the enormous quantities of rainwater that had fallen over the last months.
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| Making our way on and off-road |
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| Definitely "bogged" |
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Setting up camp on the "road" halfway
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| Simon's first go at bush camp cooking! |
When we finally arrived at our destination, we set up camp for the following 5 days. We had to bring everything we needed to survive during that time with us so it took a while to unload the trucks and organize ourselves. The group split up in two, with four of us being airlifted over the ranges to do the trapping on the other side. Simon and I stayed in the first camp together with two other volunteers, three AWC staff and a few scientists, doing field research into interaction between dingoes and “feral cats” (wild cats that stem from lost pet cats).
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| Our campsite for the 6 days |
That evening, as every following evening, we lit a big campfire for cooking our evening meal and to keep warm. Temperatures here vary enormously between day and night, dropping down quickly after the sun goes down to about freezing by 6 am and then rising again just as quickly with the rising sun to around 30 degrees.
The next morning we woke up with the first call of the birds, around 5.30 (we’ve been living now without watches for months and follow natural cycles of light and dark, and the calls of birds and such). After a cup of Billie tea (tea cooked over a campfire) and some hot porridge we were in the savannah by 6.30 to set up the trapping sites. This involved digging trenches with shovel and pick and putting up fences along pickets hammered into the hard soil. Each site took about one hour to set up and we had four of them to do. At times we felt like the chain gang working the earth with the sun beating upon us, but to be honest, by around 11 o’clock we were done and headed back to camp.
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| In our labourers' uniforms! First time in my life I handled a pic. |
That’s when there was time to relax, wander around, read a book and have some lunch, until around 3 in the afternoon when we headed off again to actually bait and set the traps for the evening, a less physically demanding job that took about two hours. We got home by sunset at 5.30 just in time before dark, to collect some wood and light the fire for the night. Dinner, mostly consisting of stews and pastas cooked in the camp oven (a huge cast-iron cooking pot placed on the coals of the campfire) was on at 6 and by 7.30 most of us retired to our tents to go to bed.
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| Our first "catch" |
The morning of the second day we set out early again to check the traps for wildlife, such as small mammals, frogs, lizards, snakes etc. This involved sticking your arms down tubes and searching for little living things. Everything that was caught got identified, measured and tagged for the records. And this cycle of setting and checking the traps repeated itself for the next 5 days.
Luckily we camped near a creek, so we could splash-bathe ourselves (among the freshwater crocodiles) in the icy cold water to refresh and get most of the dirt of ourselves, but after 6 days of this work the dust and dirt accumulated in places we didn’t know existed! So when Saturday arrived we were relieved by the foresight of heading “home” to Mornington Station and the showers…
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| This snake looked more vicious than it really was... |
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| .... this is what it looked like when picked up |
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| Relaxing after a hard day's work |
That morning we had to get physical one last time to check and then pack up the trapping sites. Then pack and clean up our camp and by 2 pm we were finally on our way home. Given our experience of the tracks on our way out we weren’t sure if we were going to make it home in one go, but to our delight we found that they had been graded (smoothened out by huge road machines) during the week we were away so it was smooth sailing all the way home.
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| Relieved to be heading "home" to base camp and the showers! |
We were welcomed home by the visiting parents of one of the staff here with a home cooked dinner, which was well received. We got into those showers faster than you could imagine and washed away days of dirt and ‘disgust’. Could we handle another two weeks of this!?
We were happy to find out the following day that AWC had planned that Simon and I were scheduled to remain in and around Mornington to do local trapping sites the following week. Those words were bliss, albeit we were still ‘camping’ but with facilities!
So here we are, doing week two, getting more or less settled into the bush lifestyle, learning a lot about ecology, wildlife, but most of all about ourselves. One thing is very clear, though…. Bush life is nice for a vacation, but not for us in the long term. We are very much looking forward to visiting Simon’s cousin, Aroha and her family, in Kununarra, after this. She has promised us that we can stay inside their HOUSE! Ah, the luxury J.”
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| A Mornington sunset |
- Rein checking out
But we came here to work, not to eat… Our first week here saw us going out with the crew to remote Marion Downs (even more remote than Mornington Station) to go trapping. While Marion is only about 170 k. away from here, it took us almost two days to reach it. Underway we got “bogged” (the Australian term for getting stuck with your car) on the rough tracks so we had to unexpectedly put up our tents half way. We were the first to make it to Marion since the “Wet” (there are only two seasons here: the Wet (roughly from November through to May) and the Dry) and we found that most of the track had been washed away by the enormous quantities of rainwater that had fallen over the last months.
That evening, as every following evening, we lit a big campfire for cooking our evening meal and to keep warm. Temperatures here vary enormously between day and night, dropping down quickly after the sun goes down to about freezing by 6 am and then rising again just as quickly with the rising sun to around 30 degrees.
