One week til SE Asia calls again

This year has been reminiscent of the first couple of years I worked for CMN - travel, travel and more travel! Next Sunday I am off to Thailand again, headed for both Bangkok and Chanthaburi. In Bangkok, it's for a couple of reasons - to meet with a few mineralogists/geologists at various universities to talk about Thai corundum, and also to attend the 2011 Thailand Science and Tech Fair held at BITEC. I'm not entirely sure what to expect, but it seems to be a combination of a CASC meeting with YSF activities coupled with a science communications conference. We'll see! But hopefully next year CMN can have a display and/or provide speakers/plenary lecturers. This year is a chance to check it out and see how we can get involved. NSM is one of the main coordinators.

Then it's down to Chanthaburi to talk to folks at the university about Thai corundum and checking out how much actual outcrop is in the area. I'm giving a talk or two there as well. Given the chance, I'm going to take a day or two on Koh Larn or possibly Hua Hin to check out the beach and get a bit of a tan. :) Hey, I'm down there - why not? Actually, a friend of mine has opened a new Thai gym in Hua Hin so I'd like to check that out. But all in all, it'll be nice to simply be in Thailand again, enjoy the food and my new friends and colleagues. I've started packing, but I suspect I have too many clothes compared to what I need! As always. But going to a conference, I have no idea what I may or may not need. And if I need casual clothes, Khao San is always around the corner.

Time to relearn some of the Thai phrases I was getting so good at this winter!!

Angry, naked baby statues in Oslo

I'm back in Ottawa following our trip to Norway and apologize for the lack of posts following Canada Day! The rest of our trip was excellent - we spent July 2nd with Alf Olav and Roy Kristiansen, who I have had email contact with but had never met in person. The four of us visited a few quarries, including 2 which were relatively ignored from a mineral point of view but had excellent rock samples. It was great to see Alf Olav again and I hope we get the chance to visit again in the near future. Maybe at the Kongsberg Symposium?

On July 4th, Glenn and I dropped the 4 buckets of rocks off at the Larvik harbour for their trip by container ship to Montreal, then truck to Ottawa. Bye bye rocks! We'll see them in 6-8 weeks. I tell you, a sports car is not the best way to transport 300 lbs of rock, all your luggage and 2 full-sized adults! That car was LOW to the ground coming out of the campground!!

We drove to Oslo and attempted to find our way through the narrow, winding, one-way streets to our hotel. It was one of the more frustrating experiences, certainly the only truly bad bit of our trip. But we did finally find the hotel, Thon Hotel Stefan, parked the now disabled and abused Alfa Romeo for the night, and checked in. We were both exhausted and wound up spending some alone time in our respective hotel rooms, watching a bit of TV and napping. After a bit, we went out and wandered the streets of Oslo and found a cafe/pub on the harbor and had lunch and a beer.

Oslo isn't that big, as we found out, and the downtown core is compact. It's a beautiful city but we were really too tired to do much other than enjoy the sunshine, have a beer, then head back to the hotel for a bit of a rest before supper. On the way, we did stop at a few tourist shops as well as a deli that sold moose, reindeer and elk salami and other dried meats and cheeses - it was great! We both bought some reindeer salami but it was confiscated at customs at the Ottawa airport. Shit. That's what happens when you are honest!

We also found a postcard with the most disturbing picture of an angry, naked baby statue on it. Not knowing what this was, but being slightly fascinated, we investigated and discovered that it was one statue in the Vigeland Statue Park, northeast of where we were staying. We decided that after supper (Brassierie 45 - excellent!) we would take a long walk and find this park.

If you want detailed information on Vigeland and the sculptures, check out this website: http://www.vigeland.museum.no/en/vigeland-park . It has more information than I could ever provide here, and certainly better written and more accurate!!

But the long and the short of it is that all 200 sculptures in this park were created by Gustav Vigeland - bronze, granite and wrought iron. The park was completed between 1939 and 1949. The bridge after the main entrance contains bronze sculptures which depict men, women and children, and the interactions between them. Here is where the Angry Baby is, and also the man kicking the babies statue! After the bridge is a fountain.

Around the perimeter are carvings which (apparently) depict the endless cycle of life. There are images in here that disturbed even me!! Pictures of children being eaten and kicked by animals, skeletons, etc. Very, very weird!

At the end of the park is a granite monolith comprised of 121 bodies which represent man's search for the divine. It's pretty cool actually, and given the light and clouds that we were having that night, it looked really neat against the sky. The granite statues around it however, very weird. Granted, all of the positions were normal, everyday positions for people to be in. But the people were all naked, so it looks a bit more strange. I think Glenn was more weirded out than I was!!




After a long walk through the naked penis park, we decided to hit up Lorry's, which is apparently an Oslo icon. It's a bar and restaurant which has a HUGE beer menu. The food reviews we checked were horrible so had decided not to go there for supper, but a last beer sounded good! After finally getting some service, I wound up having a Finnish beer and a Chang - Norway, Finland and Thailand all meet in beer form! Not bad!!

Day 4 - Quarry day

Day 4 – Friday, July 1^st, 2011

Happy Canada everyone! To celebrate, we went to the docks and bought 2 bags of fresh, wild mussels and cooked them in wine + garlic + parsley. Yum!

We spent a somewhat frustrating day today looking at the Stålaker, Hakestad, Malerod and Vardeasen quarries. Frustrating because we didn’t find many pegmatites so no interesting minerals. We did find a few samples at both Hakestad and Malerod, but nothing special and we won’t know for sure until we get back to CMN and check them out under the microscope and by XRD. As I learned when I was an undergrad, white sprays and balls are good things, so take all those home. All the ones we found are 0.1-0.5 mm in size, so maybe interesting. It’s been raining here for the last 2 days so the quarries are mudbogs. Our rental car is filthy! The powder that is created by drilling into the larvikite turns into the finest, stickiest mud imaginable when it gets wet, and it covers everything – car, boots, clothes. We are doing laundry right now in hopes that we have some clean clothes for tomorrow. As for the rental car, well, they are all all-terrain-vehicles aren’t they? The little Alfa Romeo has taken a beating on the quarry roads!

Working in quarries here in Norway is quite a bit easier than in Canada. Again for health and safety and legal reasons. In Canada, if the quarry is operating, you’re not allowed in. If it’s closed and defunct, chances are that you have to cross many barriers and blockades to access the workings. Here, unless they are blasting, you are free to wander in the quarry. Of course that does come with a certain responsibility – there are huge trucks moving throughout the quarry, drilling is taking place everywhere, and they are often pushing slabs off the walls. It can be dangerous. So the key is to be fully aware of your surroundings, know what a blasting cone looks like, and talk to the mine manager prior to going into the quarry. It’s pretty simple and everyone stays safe and happy.

Quarrying for larvikite here requires a few steps. First, connecting holes are drilled at vertically and horizontally into the rock face at each corner. When this is completed, a diamond wire (1.5 cm in diameter) is inserted into the top vertical hole and fed through the bottom horizontal hole until it emerges. The diamond wire, or diamond saw, is then connected to form a loop which is fed on a pulley on a mechanized platform at the base of the rock slab. This technology is actually from Italy where it is used in the marble quarries. When the saw is turned on, water is flushed down the drill holes and the diamond wire cuts slowly through the rock. As it moves down, the saw tension is kept by moving the entire machine backwards along the track. When the cut is finished, a similar cut is made on the opposite side and then the back. After all cuts are made with the diamond saw, a large splitter is used and the slab (~20 x 15 x 5 feet) is shoved downwards onto the lower bench. If the rock is homogeneous enough, it simply topples over. If it contains pegmatites or basalt dikes or is compromised by a fracture surface with slickenslides, then the slab will fracture on the way down. The mine managers don’t like pegmatites – they interfere with the quality of the quarried rock. Once down on the bench, the slab is drilled off into 10-15 ton blocks using an automated drill with 5 drill rods. These large blocks are then put onto container ships at the port in Larvik and sent out to be processed; very little processing is done here in Norway.

A day trip to Kongsberg

Day 3 – Thursday, June 30^th, 2011

Today we got up and discovered that it was pouring rain and decided that a more touristy day was in order. Working in quarries or on moss-covered outcrops is not the safest thing to be doing when it’s pouring rain. A light drizzle, sure, but your footing is compromised when the rocks are wet and slippery. There’s really no need for either of us to go home in a cast with a broken leg or arm, so we decided to head for Kongsberg.

Kongsberg is located 85 km north of Larvik along Hwy 40. It’s a winding, narrow road through farm land, logging forests, and up and down the mountains. Quite a nice drive actually. Our goal in Kongsberg was to visit the mineral/silver/history/ski museum and then take one of the mine tours into the 330 year old silver mines. We got to the mineral museum only to find out that the last train into the mines was leaving in 20 minutes, so we bought tickets and drove over to the mine location, 8 km away. The specific mine we were to visit is the King’s Mine. It was discovered in 1623 by 2 children who discovered a piece of silver at surface and brought it home to their father. The father recognized it as silver and sold it for a small amount, less than it was worth. King Christian IV, who at the time was the King of Denmark and Norway, declared the mine his when he discovered how rich it was.

We managed to jump into one of the mine carts just before it left. The cart would have held 8 miners in the old days, taking them 2.3 km from the head frame into the mine itself. From the head frame to the stop point, the tram actually travels 15 metres upwards into the mountainside. This is because the miners needed some way to drain the mine so the adit doubled as a transportation tunnel and a water tunnel. 2.3 km on the tram and a temperature drop of about 10 degrees brought us to a large open area in the mine where the tour started. We weren’t prepared for the 6 degree C temperature! We had on shorts and t-shirts. It was the strangest mine I have ever been in – most mines are warm, hot even, compared to the ambient temperature! This one was frigid. I was quite happy when we were able to don hardhats and start walking for the tour simply to warm up a bit! There was frost on some of the ceilings in the adits.

The King’s Mine is over 3000 feet deep, and most of it is filled with water. Only the top 300 metres are not submerged. In order to keep tours running, it has to be pumped out once a month. We spent an hour walking around the mine, seeing the old ladders and mine workings, and learning about how mining was done in the 1700’s. As dynamite didn’t exist back then, the miners used what is known as ‘firesetting’ to clear shafts and adits. Large piles of timber were place into the opening and a fire was lit. The timber was allowed to burn until it was extinguished, at which point all the surrounding rock had heated up and begun to crack. At that point in time, it was easier for the miners to come in with pick axes and chop away at the rock by hand. The host rock is a mainly a gneiss – it’s a tough rock. It would take a full month to create 3 metres of adit. Not the most time efficient method of mining! Many miners died in the mines not due to rock falls or explosions, but due to smoke inhalation when firesetting was taking place. Think about it – you’re trapped underground, a minimum of 2 km from the outside world, and someone is setting a fire in the only open space around you. Not the safest method in the world. When dynamite came along, things became much easier.

I know many people don’t enjoy being underground in a mine, but I think it’s fascinating. Especially when some of the mining techniques from 300 years ago are still visible. One of the more fascinating pieces of ingenuity we saw was a water pump turned into a lift for miners called a "mine engine". It was invented in Germany in the 1800's and essentially consists of reciprocating ladders and platforms. Two parallel timbers move up and down opposite to each other about 2 feet apart. Each timber has a hand-hold and a platform for the miner to stand on. As one platform goes down, you jump onto the one next to it, which is moving upwards. Ride the platform to it’s highest point and then jump to the one above it. Repeat as many times necessary to get to the next level. It’s really friggin’ cool!! Our guide demonstrated it for us (she said she had never done it before) but wouldn’t let us try. There are safety nets about 15 feet below where we were standing, but below that is 700+ metres of pitch-black open water-filled shaft! Such tours wouldn’t exist in Canada or the USA with the degree of regulations about health and safety we have, unfortunately.

At the end of the tour we got to see one of the banquet rooms they have available for rent. It was used as a bomb shelter during WWII and it’s beautifully set up for up to 200 people, complete with bar made out of larvikite!

After the mine tour, we went back to the mineral/silver/history/ski museum to look around. I had already been there so didn’t spend much time looking. And both of us were crashing with jet lag and hunger at this point, so by 5pm, we headed into downtown Kongsberg to secure food before the 1.5 hour drive back to Stavern. We decided on a shawarma place - $50 for 2 shawarmas and 2 cokes! That’s absolutely insane. I mean, it tasted really good, but still!! They put corn on their shawarmas here. And when we asked for hot sauce and the spicy curry sauce, the owner told us that Norwegians don’t like things spicy.

By the time we got back to our cottage, it was nearing 7:30pm. Glenn went for a run and I went down to the campground restaurant to use their WiFi and book a hotel room in Oslo for Monday night. Then we came back here and had a very extravagant meal of fried “Bog” (some sort of Norwegian version of Spam or Klick or canned ham) with Jarlsberg cheese and homemade guacamole! Maybe not the best meal at 9pm at night?