9/8/2011
Warning: This blog may contain nerdy geological content. Content in this color can be skipped if you like to avoid the geology talk.
Good Morning Balispur!
Teaching Moment! Here George was pointing out that we can tell we are close to the source of these rocks due to their large size and angular nature.
One of the best meals of my life was had here (although I have a feeling we’ll be saying that a lot this trip:
More teaching moments!
We stopped at a Sikh Temple (called a Guruduara).
A wonderful Indian man noticed us sitting in the back of the temple. We are so obviously tourists and he came up to us and encouraged us to come to the front and instructed us on how to bow properly. He then showed us around the rest of the temple and invited us into another room for chai. It was delicious.
Check out this cool mural that was on the wall of the temple.
Here we have some garnet muscovite schist. Upon seeing this Ellen said, “Niiiice!. Oh, and by nice I don’t mean gneiss.” (For you non-geologists, nice and gneiss are pronounced the same.) Hilariouuss.
LANDSLIDE!
Along side the granite, there was some pieces of granite that were red and crumbly. George enlightened us with the reasoning. Apparently water can get into the granite through fractures or cracks, which oxidizes the iron and biotite and causes the biotite to expand and “blow the rock apart from the inside out”. This makes this normally extremely cohesive rock (granite) non-cohesive. Pretty cool, eh?
Checkin’ out some more schist.
Our last stop of the day was the Basesara Mahadeva Temple, Bajaura. It is a temple dedicated to Siva, the goddess of destruction.
Today we traveled from Bilaspur to Bhunter.
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