Sorowako, also spelled Soroako, is a small mining town situated next to Lake Matano. The town serves as our home base throughout the entire project. Most of our project participants stay here, and Sorowako is also where our field research laboratory is located. From Sorowako, it takes about 40 minutes to reach Timampu, a village on the shore of Lake Towuti where we have been building our drilling barge. This picture was taken yesterday afternoon from the top of a hill just south of Sorowako. Hendrik and I were sampling different types of bedrock from the region, when we came across this lovely view of Sorowako and Lake Matano. The bedrock sampling is important because we want to understand the chemical and physical characteristics of the materials that get weathered and eventually end up in the lake as layers of sediment. -satrio wicaksono (TDP on facebook)

Our pace is accelerating. We started before dawn, and the team finished building the barge and assembled the mud tanks, drilling rig, drill rod, and work container into place. It's really starting to look like a drilling barge! We also received and launched our emergency boat (let's hope we never have to use it)- all of the boat launches were occupied with people washing cars so we had to crane it into the water. . A major thanks is due to the construction services team from PT Vale Indonesia, who worked hard all day with us with the crane, and to CKB Logistics for their help with trucking and container movements. It was a good, productive day- good enough to mark the occasion with a group photo at the end. Today was also the first day in about 20 years since I've driven a forklift- really brought back memories! (TDP on facebook)

Today was a day of crane lifts and troubleshooting while we began assembling the drilling barge in our port in Timampu. We started with a 5 AM breakfast, and worked all day to assemble the barge. Things started well, but we quickly found our little replacement forklift doesn't work well on the gravel, requiring that we tow it with a pickup. Then, one of the barge containers got jammed during assembly, which delayed us by several hours. The DES team eventually sent down a diver to try to attach cleats to the bottom of the barge to link everything together. Hours in a Neoprene suit in an 85 degree lake in the tropical sun... not much fun. But by the end of the day we managed to get all 13 of our containers transferred from our staging area to the port, and got ~75% of the barge built. Tomorrow, we'll finish off the barge, and start loading drilling gear. On a personal note, it's enormously exciting to see this all coming together. I can't help but grin as I see years and years of work coming to fruition. (TDP on facebook)

Today the DOSECC Exploration Services crew arrived and things are kicking into full swing. They arrive in style, and during our tour of their new surrounding they engaged in the latest Indonesian craze of ring shopping. Meanwhile, Hendrik and team began sampling surface sediments from around the Mahalona River delta. This is important to understanding the signals of changes in the river and delta systems in our sediment cores as the lake level rises and falls. (TDP on facebook)

Another day in paradise. The Geotek continued its petulance- today the computer failed due to a dead battery on the motherboard. After replacing and rebuilding the BIOS (yucky), we have at least determined the problem is an electronics board for the magnetics meter. A new board is en route from Geotek, and rebuilding a stack of electronics boards is in my near future. Otherwise, a new team member arrived today, Kartika Kirana, a PhD student at ITB who will investigate magnetic properties of the Towuti cores for her PhD. Welcome Tika! We took her down to a stormy but beautiful Lake Towuti this afternoon to set up our sampling and supply vessel. And this evening, a busload of drillers left Makassar bound for Sorowako. We'll be seeing them, krating daeng in hand, first thing tomorrow morning. (TDP on facebook)

The drillers went to the immigration office in Makassar to get their photographs taken today. In the first photo, taken while waiting at the office, they appeared a bit anxious as it took a while before the immigration official started calling them one by one for the photo-taking. They're also still adjusting to the heat and humidity of the tropics. As you can see from the photo, they were all converging near the AC system! In the second photo, taken right after all the immigration photographs have been taken, the drillers looked far more relaxed. Tika, another member of the drilling project from ITB in Bandung, arrived in Makassar this morning. Tika and I then went to the provincial forestry office to get the permits needed to do research in conservation areas such as Lakes Towuti and Matano. The permits were secured, and now we have cleared almost all official permits we need to do the drilling. As I am writing this post, Tika is riding the overnight bus to Sorowako! -satrio wicaksono An eventful day in Timampu, South Sulawesi. Satria and I started the day early at the Balantang port, helping with transfer of the T3W drilling rig from its flatrack to a lowboy. At ~40,000 lbs, it's a tricky lift. It's an even trickier thing to truck around, as even on a lowboy it is 4.5 meters tall. That was tall enough to require that we remove a couple sections of power line on the main road, cutting power to parts of the town. The things we do for science. But 5 hours after leaving the port, thanks in no small part to the folks at CKB logistics, the rig arrived at the Towuti shoreline. We got rig! And, in the middle of all the action, team member Chris Kelly rose from the dead (flu)! All in all, a great day. (TDP on facebook)

Another day spent setting up, mostly tracing wiring through electronics boards on our core logger. Not the most exciting thing, and we haven't fixed the problem but at least we found that we can use the logger in semi-manual mode to log core. It will only involve someone pushing a button about 25,000 times to make the measurements. Geotek trigger finger? The drillers (eight of them) from DOSECC Exploration arrived in Jakarta yesterday, and so today they went to RISTEK to get their research permits. After securing the permits, the team, headed by Beau Marshall (second from left), then went back to the airport to catch a Garuda flight to Makassar. The DOSECC drillers arrived at the Makassar airport. Makassar is famous for its seafood, and some of them told me they can't wait to get some of the freshest seafood in town! If all goes well in Makassar with residency permit processing, we should get to Sorowako near Lake Towuti on Thursday morning. -satrio wicaksono (TDP on facebook)

We spent the day setting up the research lab and ran into a pretty big snag. We have a machine (a Geotek MSCL) for measuring the physical properties of the cores, including their magnetic properties, which is very important for our research. Something must have gotten jostled during shipping, as the magnetic sensor is not working. As you can see, Ryan is horrified. I think (hope?) we'll get it working, but it's going to be days spent chasing down electronics problems on a complicated system. (TDP on facebook)

Today the expat science team arrived at Sorowako: Hendrik Vogel, Sarah Ivory, Ryan O'Grady, Ascelina Hasberg, Chris Kelly, Marina Morlock. They made it to the site after a 13.5 hour overnight bus ride variably described as "luxurious", "festive", and "crippling". We spent the day organizing the research lab, gathering supplies, and orienting the new folks to Sorowako. In the evening, we commemorated the event with a Padang meal. Special kudos goes to Sarah, who ate not only rendang and beef liver, but also beef brains! Tomorrow some hard work begins: unpacking some containers in the tropical heat, and setting up the our core logging equipment. (TDP on facebook)

Another "restful" day before the drillers arrive and the madness begins. In this case, restful equals financial accounting, setting up supply chains, chasing down a forklift order, meetings to confirm crane use, meeting with the Bupati, confirming supply, crew transfer, and towing boat availability, chasing the forklift order some more... What a day. But at the very end, we made it down to the Towuti shore, and it was a beautiful day. (TDP on facebook)

Another day, another government office. Satria, Imran, Hafidz, and I spent the morning meeting with officials from the forestry department in Makassar to obtain our final (final, final, final) piece of permitting paperwork. Not done yet, but it will work out now. We then got on board a plane (the 6th plane of this trip so far), and after an hour descended out of the clouds over Lake Towuti (left-hand photo). It was a sight for sore eyes. We spent the afternoon on errands (the new task for the coming week)- rechecking the equipment, checking housing for the team, chasing a bank transfer from Germany, measuring the research house yard for parking a 40' trailer... you get the picture. Really looking forward to getting the whole team here next week! (TDP on facebook)

The project is moving along smoothly. Here are some updates from us: 1) Yours truly delivered a talk about the project at LIPI earlier today 2) The drillers finally received their visas from the Indonesian Consulate in Los Angeles, and they will arrive in Jakarta this Sunday 3) Our project members who arrived in Makassar yesterday just got their photographs taken at the immigration office Meanwhile, our co-PIs, James Russell and Satria Bijaksana, will be arriving in Sorowako/Lake Towuti tomorrow. It's getting real now. (TDP on facebook)

Today has been a busy day in Jakarta for our project. In addition to Jim Russell from Brown, who is spearheading the whole project with Satria Bijaksana from the Bandung Institute of Technology, six other foreign researchers from Germany and the USA have now arrived in Jakarta. More scientists, as well as the drillers, will arrive in Jakarta over the next two weeks. After spending one day in Jakarta to obtain the research permit, each of them will spend a couple of days in Makassar, the capital of South Sulawesi, to process temporary residency permit. After that, they may go to Sorowako, the closest town from Lake Towuti. (TDP on facebook)

As Jim said in a previous post, he is currently in the Big Durian. Welcome to Jakarta, Jim! Selamat datang di Jakarta! Here's a picture of him in an auto rickshow, called bajaj by Jakartans. It was raining yesterday evening, so we took a bajaj to get us to our meeting with the folks who will be filming the Towuti Drilling Project. It is early morning now in Jakarta. In a few hours, we will be at the Ministry of Research, Technology, and Higher Education office to start processing our research permits. -satrio wicaksono (TDP on facebook)

Today the project officially begins. I said goodbye to beautiful Rhode Island and my lovely wife for the next two months and got on a plane bound for Jakarta. On Monday we continue our 'vigorous discussion' with Jakarta immigration and hopefully finalize our research permits and visas once and for all. Wish us luck, and look for our posts here as we anticipate we'll finally start drilling in about 2 weeks! Jim R. (TDP on facebook)