The guy on the left is one of the owners of a very beautiful piece of land in Australia. You can see Michael dancing for joy here. It also helps to compact the sand.
Mt Best is a few hours drive south of Melbourne. The land is millions and millions of years old, and you can feel it. You can see for miles, in the distance is Wilson's Prom, a peninsula that sticks out into the ocean.....and there is nothing more until you get to Antarctica. The weather is very changeable. It is very hot in summer, and very cold in winter. The wind blowing up from Antarctica goes to the bone
This is the Venerable Lama Samten, who lives in New Zealand.
Michael and Mary, Australian friends, and invited him to come and build a stupa on their land, which is a healing centre. Lama said: "sure, and I'd like to bring one of my students to help", so I got to go too. He's posing with Mary's daughter, who was a very able participant in this one lunar month marathon....
That's the crew: Lama, Michael, Mary and Sara. Michael spent a lot of time bringing water in large pickle barrels from the local town, as there wasn't any on site, and you use an amazing amount mixing concrete.
That's me keeping warm as we started laying blocks
Wow, up to the throne boxing already! Are these guys fast or what?
Now you can see it's quite a decent size: 100mm per unit (there's around 69 units in the standard stupa, but here we lifted the base up another few feet, can't remember why now, maybe the site just demanded it :)