Trip report
| 2017-07-23 | International Congress of Speleology (17th ICS) at Penrith Panthers |
| Trip report: | |
| The idea of hosting the World Caving Conference was suggested in 2012. A group prepared a proposal for the Trogalong ASF Meeting in January 2013. The venue was to be the Penrith Panthers Leagues Club. This was chosen as the venue and accommodation because it was far cheaper than an in inner Sydney site. The ASF created a separate entity to run the bid. A Committee worked on the very detailed bid to be put to the September UIS Congress in Brno in the Czech Republic. The core 12 person Committee was led by Denis Marsh from Orange and covered about 18 basic tasks. It liaised with the UIS Vice President George Veni of the US. There were 24 people in Executive support roles. A further 42 people led the pre and post excursions planning. Running a Congress is a very complex operation and many areas to be covered in the bid. The theme of Caves in an Ancient Land was chosen. A major problem was estimating how many would attend. Because many visitors from the Northern Hemisphere think the trip is expensive the prices has to be kept as low as possible. Numbers at others Congresses were between 800 to1200. A break even figure of about 430 was picked and prices set accordingly. The refund policy was quite complex. One of the hidden expenses is to provide facilities for various IUS meetings. As well any past Presidents of UIS had to accommodated for free! There are professional event organisers but they would charge $80 per attendee. So it had to be a totally self run Congress. The Committee came from NSW, Vic, Tas and WA and a lot a travel was involved for any meeting. The core of the Congress is the web site. This is how Delegates and other attendees get information and make bookings for Congress, excursions, merchandise and field trips. There were 17 pre and post field trip available. With comprehensive information on the web site everyone will make their own accommodation bookings. Newsletters were a means of updating everyone. There were two circulars mandated by the IUS. The second one was 50 pages long with a wealth of information. As well 10 eBulletins were issued. There was great emphasis on preventing White Nose Syndrome from entering Australia and New Zealand. This disease is devastating bats populations in North America. Mary Ann took the job of Partner's Program, organising excursions in the Sydney area. As we have only been in Sydney for 5 years there was a lot of investigating to do. I was the Accommodation Coordinator which meant keeping the web site up dated. An interesting project was Cathie Plowman's crowd funding of two scholarships to Congress for students from SE Asia or the Pacific. Notices were put in caving regional Organisations and submissions called for. One from Indonesia and the other from PNG were judged the lucky winners. A wonderful opportunity for the students to attend and present at the International Congress fully paid. Registrations looked like about 450 attendees with about 120 Australians. A special mention must be made of the efforts of Emily Davis and Mike Warner of Speleo Books, New York State(http://speleobooks.com). They travel to many many caving events and they hard sold Speleo2017 to anyone who would listen. They said it make a trip of a lifetime as many Americans think it is a long way. In the final months it became a lot busier. The handbook had to be prepared and printed. Many boxes of material had been sent to the Dave Tweed's place for storage. This was all brought to the Mercure for the filling of the Delegate’s bags which started on the prior Thursday. The job was finished on the Saturday just before the Sunday start. At Congress there were about 400 presentations with up to 5 simultaneous sessions. It was frustrating not to be at 3 sessions at once. Most of the proceedings are on a USB stick. The Club will get a copy. This will be reissued soon to have all possible information on it. I won't go into any details as there is so much available on the USB. One presentation that impressed was by John Hellstrom of the University of Melbourne using an ordinary camera and open source software (free) to generate 3D cave maps. These can even be 3D printed. A very cheap solution to mapping. The software is Inkscape. https://inkscape.org/en/ He suggested using version 0.91 as it was less buggy. Try it. A convention of a UIS Congress is the mid-week excursion. This caused much anxiety for the Committee in the planning stages. Multiple buses had to get to Jenolan on a very narrow road which imposed severe time constraints. It was also not unknown for the road to be cut by snow in mid-winter. Even worse if the the group were stranded in Jenolan. As there was no possible Plan B it was just a matter of hoping for the best. As it turned out the Congress had perfect weather for the week. So at a chilly 6:45am on the Wednesday morning 149 of the 150 booked for excursion boarded the 5 coaches and were away by 7:00. Once at Jenolan there was a very busy schedule for tours. There was even a cello concert in one of the caves for this special occasion. The staff at Jenolan did a marvellous job on the day many taking holiday time off for this. (The person who missed the Jenolan trip was so excited about the trip that he got very little sleep the night before. He went to sleep on the train and missed the Penrith Station. When he finally got to Panthers he had to make do with the Excursion to the Australian Museum). The Sydney Speleological Society set up and ran the Speleo Olympics. The highlight was buxom woman getting her chest stuck in the squeeze. She was assisted through by someone pushing on her anatomy. She called out, “It is all right, he is a Doctor and my husband.” The Congress was a great success thanks to an amazing amount of work done by the organising Committee. Mary Ann ran the partners program which was mainly the tourist sights. It had been suggested that only a few (3-4) would be on any trip so shouldn't be too hard to manage. But with up to 21 on an excursion it became a “herding cats” exercise especially with the confusion using the electronic Opal transport cards. As part of the Congress policy all excursions would be on public transport using Opal cards. The trips went to Featherdale Wildlife Park, Parramatta, Botanic Gardens, Scenic World in the Blue Mountains and walked the Harbour Bridge. No-one was permanently lost and everyone throughly enjoyed themselves.There were 17 pre and post Congress caving trips for attendees ranging from the Margret River caves in WA to Chillagoe and 3 areas of New Zealand. Although it wasn't on an official trip a Swiss caver broke a leg in a cave in Tasmania. This resulted a dramatic night evacuation by helicopter! At the Congress Banquet she received the “Dramatic Entrance Award.” I went on the post-Congress Palaeontology tour from Adelaide to Melbourne. The nine participants came from Germany, Italy, New Zealand and your truly and it was led by Liz Reed and Steve Bourne. Liz is the Chief Scientist at Naracoorte Caves. At the SA Museum some of the extensive fossil collection were shown to us. At the University the complicated thermo-luminesce dating process was explained. It is no wonder that the tests cost $2000.00 each. Then we drove to Naracoorte for a 3 night stay. For two days we were shown the many fossil deposits in the caves. There are hundreds of years of work ahead of the palaeontologists. Many are the same megafauna that are in Broken River. A highlight of the trip was the mystery dinner. The area is an up and coming wine producer much like the nearby Coonawarra. We were driven in the dark into a vineyard and then walked down rough stone steps into a hole in the ground. This led to about 100m of passage that opened into a chamber set up for a banquet. This venue is used by the major winemaker Treasury Estates for VIP dinners. The winemaker described the areas wines which we sampled. He held up a glass and apologised that this did not come from the vines growing overhead. It came from vines a few hundred metres away. The German visitors made a surprise presentation of steins to our leaders Steve and Liz. Then it was off to Mt Gambier to look at the famous sink holes which is a mecca for cave divers. Overnight was at Warrnambool. The final day was the tourist drive along the Great Ocean Road to end up in Melbourne. Overall the trip was a great success. Douglas Irvin. Sydney | |