The landscape to the north of Albuquerque would be difficult to explain, it is quite unexpected after the absolute flatness of the land around the city. We were headed in Bob Vardeman's little Mercedes up towards Los Alamos and the Indian cave dwellings at Bandelier, the cave dwellings mainly but Los Alamos was on the way so we decided to call in and see the famous community. It had rained the previous day and it looked as though it would be doing so again, Bob looked up at the sky unbelieving, so did most of the natives but we thought it was nothing unusual. That part of the country is dry and on the day we had arrived I had been impressed by the seeming desert which surrounded Albuquerque. We began by driving towards the hills to the north and gradually the land began to rise. At first I saw many similarities between the land there and the land in the Mallee in north west Victoria where I grew up, we passed through one small town and it reminded me so strongly of the little towns up in the mallee that I would not have been surprised to hear one of the locals speaking with a 'strine accent. The drive was long but not boring for soon we entered more hilly land, the geology of which I'd seen often enough in films. The road wound itself through gorges and gullies cut out of the rock by eons of wear from the rain and wind. Different layers of rock had been worn away at different rates and each level hung out or receded back into the faces of the cliffs. Just when we were getting used to that the land began to seem less rugged but more mountainous the bleak cliffs and bluffs giving way to steeply rising banks of trees and grass once more. We had passed once again into a land of some fertility, far more fertile than the land we had seen around Albuquerque and certainly much more so than the land that lay between. The narrow road wove its way through the vallies between the peaks and at one spot Bob pointed out that we were in the middle of an ancient volcano crater about twenty miles across. The soil was very fertile and the grass looked luxuriant It was a good place for cattle though not, Bob said, when it snowed. Snow. We couldn't imagine that it would snow so far south but Bob reminded us that we were a long way from the sea and that we were quite high and getting higher aIl the time. A quick comparison led us to the astounding conclusion that we were already higher than Mount Koscusko which is the highest peak in Australia, even though the mountains in Australia aren't too high and the highest is no exception. Los Alamos itself seems easy to find, we drove along the right road and there were buildings on both sides of the road but nothing that we counted as being the centre of the place. We drove on looking out for something and then we had gone right through the town. What we saw were buildings and houses set in lush green surroundings, a very pleasing sight to be sure. When we decided that we had better turn around and try again we drove along the same road back past the same buildings but we saw no more than there had been before, no matter how hard we strained our eyes. There were some big buildings which were rather obviously government establishments of one sort or another but nothing like what we were after by that time, namely somewhere to eat. Finally we gave up driving up and back along the same road and struck out along one of the streets leading off from it. Our reward was not much better. We drove a bit further and the things we saw were not much different from those we'd already seen. We turned back towards our first road and were lucky enough to finally spy a hamburger place coming up on our right. We had hoped for something more ambitious but we were not willing to wait any longer. It was food and that was something. Surprisingly we found our way to the museum easily. It was not your normal museum with a little bIt of everything but very specialized towards atomic science. The large parking lot was almost empty and we arrived just in time to miss the first few minutes of the guided 27