Ben, Em, Diana, and Helen

Greetings from the Northwest!

Archives for December 2009

Panorama

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Whooops, Diana’s awake, so that’s all I have time for right now!  Here’s some pictures of the pit and a panorama….. done

Grasberg Open-Pit Mine Tour

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The Grasberg open-pit mine has been operating since about 1993 and while copper is the main product, it also has the largest gold reserves of any mine in the world. The mine doesn’t have extremely high-grade gold ore, it is just larger than almost any other ore deposit. The town of Tembagapura and the processing facilities were all built for the now exhausted Gunung Bijih Mine, which translates as “Ore Mountain”. Mining at Gunung Bijih started in 1974 and, while it was much smaller than Grasberg, it had very high grades and was worth the trouble of working in a very remote place.
The bottom of the open-pit is currently at about 3,200 meters above sea-level. (The highest level of the Big Gossan underground mine nearby is at 3,120 meters!) This is getting too deep to profitably mine as an open pit mine and the pit is planned for closure in 2015. A new underground mine called the Grasberg Block Cave Mine is currently being built 500 meters below the pit. Once built the Grasberg Block Cave Mine will be the largest underground mine in the world.

One of the most exciting sights from the Grasberg Mine is Puncak Jaya (Victory Peak) which is a little over 16,000 feet tall and the highest point between the Himalayas and the Andes. (Thanks Wikipedia.) There are also three small glaciers nearby.

Our tour guide was Ichal from the Surface Geology department. He is originally from Fak-Fak, just north of Australia, and has been working here for four years.

Our first visitor!

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Emily’s mother Louise arrived on Thursday after a few hours of travel to get to Tembagapura.  Diana has been having a great time even though she is getting new teeth again.  (After these four, she should be done for about another year.)  We opened presents Christmas morning and presented Diana with her new rocking horse which she has slowly been getting used to.  She went for two long rides today gave the horse a few hugs.  After we opened presents, we had a great brunch at the Lupa Lelah Club (the nice restaurant in town) with a few friends.  We were lucky enough to get clear weather for our tour of the open-pit mine today and will try to post some pictures tomorrow.

Two Pictures

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Just two pictures to post tonight.   The first one is from Em’s friend who is the receptionist at the clinic.  (Just FYI that’s “rumah sakit” in Indonesian – literally the “sick house”.)  I never feel cool enough to go to the doctor anymore.  The second one is from work the other day.  It’s me and Niko, an engineer, in front of the raisebore machine which is reaming out the Central Return Air Raise to 3-meters in diameter.  Don’t worry if that doesn’t mean anything…

Pict-o-Rama

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Diana does cute things once in awhile.  Sometimes we get a picture of them.  We’re especially proud of her tryouts for the fencing team.  She trains on a daily basis while mommy makes her breakfast.  Also her hair is getting long – everyone compliments her – and sometimes it can be unruly.  Last weekend she took her biggest face-plant yet out in front of the house.  She stumbled over the small stone wall and landed on her forehead and bumped her nose.  The sidewalk won that round, but she was up again after a few minutes.  She’s all better now.  She enjoys the Christmas lights that are up around our neighborhood and the tiny plastic tree for sale at the market.  Lastly, she did #2 for the second time in the bath tonight.  We’re very proud, but didn’t get a picture of that.  Maybe next time…

November Out-takes

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We’ve been busy and haven’t taken too many pictures since last weekend so I pulled a few from November to get us moving into the weekend.  Trivia: if I remember correctly, the cat in the picture was “bought” by the Wilmot family for a can of Coke; in addition to handing out wedding invitations to everyone they know, my coworkers send out fancy Power-Point presentations set to awful love ballads; you will often see Israeli flag stickers on Papuan worker’s helmets – as I understand it they are trying to annoy their (mostly) Muslim Indonesian supervisors; Emily made our first digital-download music purchase this week (Flight of the Conchords); this morning at the gym the 40-ish guy who came in after me put in a CD of workout music – apparently Vogue by Madonna really gets him pumped up; the guy who showed up before me was working out in black socks; badminton is HUGE here and is on TV every night; I was in a meeting this week where Charley interrupted Hengky to say, “Stop interrupting me!” – it was hard not to laugh.  Lastly, the charity picnic that we went to a few weeks ago raised $55,000 for the daughter of the Australian that was killed in July.  The winning bid for a scale model of a haul truck was over $5,000.  That was pretty cool.

We have met another couple here who is from Michigan and we seem to get along with them.  (I’m not sure if that has anything to do with them being from Michigan, but they seem very normal compared to all of the Australians!)  They are teachers and moved here from Latvia with their 2 year old daughter.  Diana and their girl seem to get along well so we’ll try to get together with them again this weekend.  We haven’t met anyone here from Vermont yet…