Loose_Grip/Pete's photos with the keyword: 1980

Walking in the fields off the Berestagi road near Pancurbatu southwest of Medan. We were recce-ing a trail for the Medan House House Harriers in this area. The atap hut has seen better days. In this view there are ground nuts in the foreground, maize beyond, with a smattering of banana & palm trees. The Barisan mountains are on the skyline to the south.

A fairly early Sunday morning drive around the city of Medan. This is Jalan Letjen Suprapto although I notice that the modern spelling (from Google) is different from that on the street sign on the far left. I worked in the Mobil Oil Indonesia office further back on Jalan Jenderal Sudirman - the former pre-war Shell office.

Terlingua graveyard in West Texas on the northern edge of Big Bend National Park. The discovery of cinnabar, from which the metal mercury is extracted, in the mid-1880s brought miners to the Terlingua area, creating a city of 2,000 people. The only remnants of the mining days are a ghost town of the Chisos Mining Company and several nearby capped and abandoned mines. The population today is 78! Terlingua features in Wim Wenders' movie Paris, Texas. HFF everyone. Enjoy your Easter weekend.

The Window & the Chisos Mountains looking west from the lodge in the Chisos Basin at the centre of Big Bend National Park out towards the Chihuahua desert. The Chisos Mountains are mainly of igneous origin and were erupted and deposited during the Cenozoic. The oldest rocks in the mountains are volcanic ash, mixtures of ash and clay, sandstone, and conglomerates.

Saqsaywaman/Sacsayhuamán was an Inca fortress complex & the historic capital of the Inca Empire. The site is at an altitude of 3,701 m (12,142 ft). The complex was built by the Incas in the 15th century. Dry stone walls constructed of massive stones were erected on the site, with the workers carefully cutting the boulders to fit them together tightly without mortar. The figures on the extreme left give an idea of scale. The Spaniards used Sacsayhuamán as a source of stones for building Spanish Cuzco; within a few years, they had taken apart and demolished much of the complex. The site was destroyed block by block to salvage materials with which to build the new Spanish governmental and religious buildings of the colonial city, as well as the houses of the wealthiest Spaniards. HI (Inca) WW to everyone!

The Permian El Capitan reef complex in the Guadeloupe Mountains on the Texas-New Mexico border. After the flight from Dallas to El Paso we transferred to the tour bus for a geological field trip around West Texas. As an undergraduate I wrote a long essay on carbonate reefs referring to the Guadalupian El Capitan as the prime ancient analogue of modern build-ups. It was a real buzz to actually visit it and hit the rocks with a hammer!

From the Sunda Kelapa Harbourmaster's Tower looking north onto the Kali Besar and a veritable forest of masts on the pinisi, traditional two-masted wooden sailing ships which still provide inter-island freight services in the archipelago.

We climbed Sibayak volcano a couple of times when we lived in Medan. This this was the first ascent and we met this group of kids on their way down. A photo was called for. The walk starts in rice padi fields but climbs quite steeply through forest and then onto open rock. The crest is at 2,212 m (7,257 ft) and in the clouds it gets chilly when you're wearing shorts!

When I first started working for Blue Circle Cement in 1970 one of my fellow geologists had just come back from an assignment in Langkawi Malaysia. I was impressed by his stories of this island paradise in the Strait of Malacca near the Thai border but never thought I would ever go there. Wind on 10 years & I was living in North Sumatra and discovered that a short flight from Medan to Penang followed by a shorter flight by light aircraft northward would take me to the small airport at Langkawi. It was well worth the trip and the unspoilt island was a delight. It remained a quiet backwater until 1986, when the Malaysian Prime Minister transformed it into a major tourist resort. A large international airport was built and the island rapidly grew as a tourist destination, and by 2012, it received over three million tourists a year.

From one volcano to another! We are on on Mount Sibayak (Indonesian: Gunung Sibayak) an active Pleistocene-to-Holocene stratovolcano peaking at 2,181 m (7,156 ft). The other volcano is Mount Sinabung, about 15km to the southwest, that in 2010 erupted after a 400-year-long hiatus, a blink of an eye in geological time. Both volcanoes are part of the Barisan Mountain range that runs NW-SE for a 1000 miles along the whole length of Sumatra parallel to the Sumatra Trench & includes 35 active volcanoes. Although its last eruption was more than a century ago, Sibayak has geothermal activity in the form of steam vents and hot springs on and around the volcano. The vents produce crystalline sulfur, which was being mined on a small scale in 1979 (men carrying sacks down the mountain on their backs). Seepage of sulfurous gases has also caused acidic discolouration of the small crater lake part of which can be seen bottom middle.

Pulau Seribu sailing ship carrying wood from Sulewasi to Jakarta. The wooden framework on the right is a fishing platform common in the shallow water all over Indonesia. The photo was taken early morning en route from Jakarta to Pulau Seribu on a geological field trip to study the coral reefs. I know, it's a dirty job but somebody has to do it.

I made a stopover in Anchorage when on the return trip to Indonesia after a meeting in New York. I had the whole day - my plane didn't depart until the evening - so rented a car and drove north on Highway 1 & into the mountains.

The final destination of our railway journey from Cusco. Machu Picchu is a 15th-century Inca citadel located in the Eastern Cordillera of southern Peru on a 2,430-meter (7,970 ft) mountain ridge. The Incas built the estate around 1450 but actually abandoned it a century later, at the time of the Spanish conquest. It was obviously a tourist site when we visited but has become much more popular since 1980. In 2007, Machu Picchu was voted one of the New Seven Wonders of the World in a worldwide internet poll & I have to say its location in the Andes is absolutely stunning.

Colourfully dressed Peruvian girls with llama and lamb on the mountain top north of Cusco. I think we had been to Sacsayhuamán and drove on into the surrounding mountains.

Enafer Peru (Empresa Nacional de Ferrocarriles del Perú) 914mm gauge diesel 485, Alco, MLW DL535B built in 1963, waiting at a crossing loop in the Andes Mountains, probably Ollantaytambo. We were en route between Cusco and Machu Picchu on this grey day.

Indonesia Sumatra, Kampong Keling market, Medan. Note the fine vegetables amongst the tropical fruit. These were grown in Brastagi a few hours drive and a few thousand feet higher to the southwest where the climate was more temperate. We lived in Medan from 1979 to 1981 when I worked for Mobil & greatly enjoyable it was. I found the people and places fascinating. Every day threw up something new & even on the walk to the office you saw different things of interest. I went back on holiday in 1997 &, unsurprisingly, things had changed. Toko Ben's - the sacks sit outside the shop entrance - had transformed into a modern supermarket no longer opening onto the market but what shocked me the most was the fact that the Mobil office building had been converted into a Pizza Hut! A sign of the times I suppose.