Thursday, February 10, 2011

Travelling Stones-Part 1 (Australia)

AUSTRALIA:

My first big change for me in years was leaving my full time job of 12 years. I had wanted to take time off strickly to travel. So, I was hoping to travel in a big way this year. Well I did!! I left mid January for Australia via Hong Kong and spent almost a month there. I really had only booked this trip with 10 days notice. I had other parts of my winter planned but this was more of a surprise to me. I had a chance to visit Woolengong, Sydney, Melbourne, the Outback (which is all around Alice Springs et al) and then to Perth (where Cyclone Yasi re-routed me from going to the east coasts) to do the coastline there. I saw some of the most amazing geological sights in all the years I had done field trips as a Geologist, but this time was for pleasure. Unfortunetly, with all the costs of the country combined with some of the stones not marketed as well as I thought they would be, there were mainly raw stones purchased, with a few exceptions. I however plan to work some of them up before they make it to any necklace or jewellery piece. I managed to get a few good local stones. A chunk of Crystoprase from a local market, Amethyst, Mookite, and Garnets. I even found a place in the Blue Mountains that had the neatest Opal pendants and Primodial Petrofied Algae (Zebra Stone) and some Tiger Eye items. I also saw the modern day Wollami Tree (@Wollami Gems Store) which was the results of finding seeds that were found deep in the Blue mountains, now grown into the modern Wollami tree, side by side with the its equivalent, the ancient fossil. Really cool!!

Blue Mountain Sunset

Three Sisters: Blue Mountains

The Wollami Tree and the Wollami fossil.

Some of the stones are shown below. I even bought an Ammonite Shell specimen which was actually from back home in Alberta...I had to cause it was a good one and probably a lot cheaper than what I would pay back home.