Kaiam Airstrip

Here's the business end of the Kaiam airstrip as it looked on June 8th, 2010.  Hopefully I'll actually be motivated to upload the panorama pictures of the whole airstrip (which means that I'll need to stitch them together first)...  I've been back in Mambis for about a month and I still haven't gone through all the photos and video that I took while down in the Penale.  Since we only have solar pannels for power, and my computer is an energy hog I figured that I'd just put all my photos onto an external hard drive and do the actual work of going through them when I got back to the hydro power in Mambis.  What I didn't figure on was taking so many photos that I can't put them all on my computer at once...  Yeah, my 250Gb hard drive computer had about 30Gb free when I got back from Kaiam and not all the photos from the trip would fit.  I think I shot close to twice that.

Anyway, the airstrip here was soaking from a good rain overnight so we were unable to drive that morning.  Instead we spent the morning waiting for the sun to restore the wet, sloppy clay to a sticky goo that we can actually drive on without making too many ruts.  The amount of rain that the Penale gets is amazing.  I want to put up a small weather station to record it, but that's a story for another time.

The rain is also just as lacking in the dry season as it was prevalent during the rainy season.  The guys that are down there currently tell me, over the radio, that the sun has been baking the clay into bricks so that the stone we were breaking up with the big tractor is indistinguishable from the regular clay that needs to be moved.  In other words the top surface of our airstrip has been fired into pottery.  Instead of hoping it stops raining so we can get some work down, they're hoping for some rain to loosen up the soil so they can get some work done.  Such harsh conditions no matter which way you look at it.