**Written November
20, 2011. Post delay due to lack of
internet.
It has been a few
days now since I arrived at Prominent Hill, so I though I would give everyone a
brief overview of my life at the mine.
I arrived Wednesday
afternoon after a 2:40h flight which stopped in Port Augusta. It's a bit strange to have a whole flight of
people who are all going to the same job site as you, since usually you're
quite anonymous on an airplane.
Unfortunately my pictures from the plane didn't really turn out, but
this was just as we were landing in Port Augusta and you can see where the
ocean meets the Outback.
When I arrived I met
someone from my team and got my room assignment, but then had the afternoon to
myself. Since my room hadn't been
cleaned from the previous person yet I decided to go for a swim in the amazing
pool they have here. It's about 4 lanes
and I'm guessing almost 25m long, and it is the perfect temperature; it's just
cold enough to cool you off after a hot day.
Overall the
facilities here are quite impressive.
The food is surprisingly good for buffet food and they have a lot of
healthy options (and not so healthy ones) to choose from, as well as a huge
variety of both hot and cold food.
During breakfast you also pack your lunch for that day, and that has
also been pretty good. They have tons of
salad options usually, as well as leftover hot food, meat pies, and all the
typical sandwich fixings. My room is
pretty good (bed, tv, desk, bathroom) and the neighbours are quiet.
The job itself is
repetitive but completely learnable and manageable. I think I'm doing a really good job, and
hopefully I'll learn some more things soon.
Here's a picture of the core shed I've been working in for the past few
days.
Basically I take the
drill core from those black trays, lay them out on the bench and make sure they
all fit together. Then I mark them,
measure them, and put them back in the black trays. Easy.
It's also a bit more of a social job since there are always other people
working on the other rows around you.
There are other jobs in other sheds that I haven't learned yet, but this
one is pretty good so far. The hardest
part is physically standing for 12 hours.
My legs are doing alright, but my feet are absolutely killing me. We get two 15 minute breaks and a 40 minute
lunch break, but that's the only sitting for the whole day. Going from being unemployed to this has been
extremely hard for me, but I'm doing my best to be optimistic. I keep telling myself it's great to break in
my feet for hiking in New Zealand!
Where we work is in
between the Village (where everyone eats/sleeps/exercises) and the Pit (the
massive mine), so this is the view we have every day from work. Again, not a good picture since it was from
my phone.
There is also a
large area outside where we lay out all of the trays for the geologists to look
at (hence why Ryan is getting a tan and I'm not!)
Today we were moving
some of these trays and found a ton of wolf spiders. From what I understand they can get quite big
(the ones we saw were smaller than a bottle cap) and you'll have to go to the
hospital if they bite you, but they won't kill you. I've also seen a few hawks and wedge tailed
eagles, which makes sense since there are mice everywhere! One ran up my leg while I was reading at a
desk in the core shed. Gross. Unfortunately that probably means there are
snakes around, but it also means there are cool lizards like the goannas that
hang out around camp. I don't have a
picture of them yet, but hopefully I will soon.
Anyways, I think
that's all of the excitement for now.
I'm exhausted and pretty much go to bed as soon as I get off the phone
with Ryan around 9pm. I've been getting
up at 4:40am, which has actually been the easiest part of the job. I have cell reception so I can check email
and stuff, but unfortunately no computer internet.
