Chillagoe, tests and more outbacky goodness!

Thursday

We woke up to some more lectures about wildlife and the incredibly dangerous snakes, cool frogs with pouches, birds that can repeat gunshots and all of the adorable marsupials! We also discussed how fire is important to the maintenance of rainforest regimes and lots of good stuff like that!

Then in the afternoon we did some ant investigating. We went out into a cow paddock and set out trays of canned tuna and honey and waited to see what ants would come. Since our area was pretty disturbed due to the presence of cows, we only got one species of ants =( but we had fun doing yoga out in the cow fields! We also had fun petting the horses and bouncing the volleyball around some more.

Next day we were heading on a day trip and hte other group was studying so we went to bed early! 

Friday

We headed to Chillagoe, which is about 2.5 hours inland from where we currently are. That means more dry and red dirt, but also cool rock and cave formations. There is a huge presence of limestone in that area which has created intricate cave systems with automatic "air conditioning" like the place we saw in Turkey (family you know what I mean). But it was really nice as the day was super hot. There are these amazing trees that extend their roots all the way through to the soil at the bottom of the caves, which is crazy! We also did some crawling in small places and looked for the funny formations in the rock. It was cool to see some fossils in the rock too (as limestone comes from old coral systems).

As it was still blisteringly hot in the mid australia life, we went to a water billabong and swam around, jumping off rocks and taking underwater selfies! We then got down to more work by investigating a new ecosystem called dry vine thicket and the strategies it takes to conserve water. This happened to be in a beautiful park where we looked at some old aboriginal paintings and also got to watch a spectacular sunset, (after counting and measuring 100 leaves for part of an experiment)!

At the end of the day we headed to a local pub for fun! WE played pool and darts and drank the local beer and cider ( which I am still a big fan of ) and ejnoyed our time!

Saturday and Sunday

These two days were dedicated to studying and taking exams and doing runs and ab workouts.

We did have an interesting talk from the aboriginal people who live near this area, and how they have been and are still mistreated by their goverment. It seems so odd still to me that this issue is not brought to the forefront of discrimination movements.  

So we have a huge hike tomorrow and I just finished my field book, so I am going ot watch the end of the movie the Red Dog, which is pretty iconic australian, and maybe play some cards and head to bed because two tests in two days and a whole work book is exhausting.

Excited for free days! See ya soon.