The hill where the ore body is, is so remote there are no roads. All the equipment is moved by helicopter in a process called "longlining". Because the trees are so tall, they only cut a few down at each drilling site, and the helicopter pilot drops all the gear in on a 150 or 200 ft cable through the trees. The drilling rig is moved in 4 pieces, and the pilots are so good they lift each piece into position while the guys on the ground frantically bolt it together.

When the helicopter isnt available, or if like me you aren't important enough to warrant the rather high operating costs, you walk up. The main access track is so steep they build ladders and hand rails using the local trees. The whole deposit is covered with tropical rainforest. The ladder rungs are designed for Indonesians, so every now and then a big fat white guy like me breaks through the rungs. It is about 30 degrees and incredibly humid, so white guys like me have trouble carrying enough water to get through the day without sweating into oblivion when walking up and down the hill.

In the lower elevation areas, the forest has been cut down to allow rubber plantations. The coconut shell on each rubber tree fills up surprisingly fast, and gets collected and poured into a hole in the ground until it all ferments into a rather rancid solid square lump of rubber which can be carried down the hill to be sold.

This is the geology office in the exploration camp, built amongst the trees of a rubber plantation. Instead of being made up of porta-cabins, as most exploration camps are, all of the buildings in camp have been made from local timber, which makes it a much more pleasant place to spend some time. The odd glass of red wine, sitting on the office verandah in the evening under a fan, does the job on a few aches from climbing the hill during the day.

This butterfly (moth? I'm a geologist, not an entymologist) is about 4 or 5 inches across. This place really is tropical.

Believe it or not, this is a drilling platform, constructed against a cliff face. They stuck a drilling rig on it, and diamond drilled 200 m sideways into the hill. Although the branches look pretty thin, there are a lot of them, and when fresh they are quite strong. By the time I stood on it it was looking a bit more dodgy. Apparently they chained the drilling rig to a tree in case the platform let go, which would have been a pretty exciting event for the blokes operating it.

This is Lake Toba, which I drove past on the way to site (although I didn't take the photo, I stole that from Brian). The lake is actually a volcanic crater. When it blew around 72000BC it took about 2,800 cubic kilometres of magma with it. (2000 went into the atmosphere, 800 flowed on the ground). This lowered world temperatures by 5 to 10 degrees and particles stayed in the atmosphere for 6 years. It may have been a controlling event on the development of the human race by greatly reducing the population. It was much bigger than Krakatoa (about 21 cubic kilometres of material into the atmosphere according to most websites), the main reason Krakatoa is so well known is that it managed to blow in 1883, shortly after the invention of the telegraph, so it got reported worldwide, and was the first global news phenomenon. To compare, Mt St Helens, which blew in the TV age and got lots of coverage, blew a mere 1 cubic kilometre of material.