Back to the beach

After two aborted starts (a week’s delay in operations and an expired visa) I finally got myself on an Emirates flight to Dubai and then onto Jeddah. So much of relief. I didn’t even mind the fact that I had a 6 hour layover in JHB on the way out… I hit the Slow Lounge, threw my bags in one of the little VIP chill rooms (with a TV and small bed), ate and drank as much as I could, and reclined until my flight departure at 19h10.

An uncomfortable night on the plane, as expected (when will Fugro realise I’m worth Business Class?!), a brief hour in Dubai airport before boarding my first A380!! Great excitement until I realised that during my online adventures I had managed to secure myself a row of three seats right over the wing!! Which is the size of a soccer field, so no view for me! Dammit! I did, however, get to play with all the shiny buttons of the in flight entertainment, and as most of you would imagine, that no doubt had more allure to me than a view of miles and miles of sand.

A380, baby!! Lower level	All shiny new and very wide
I can see Felix Baumgartner hanging from a balloon from here!

Thankfully I was checked into a small hotel in Jeddah when I arrived mid-morning before being taken back to the airport to board an internal flight to Gassim/Qassim (depending on which sign you read). Most towns have very variable spellings – no doubt because its translated from Arabic. The bonus about this flight, however, was that I had been given a Business Class ticket as presumably that was all that was left. So straight into the Business Class lounge I raced where I once again ate and …. well, just ate as much as I could before the 1 hour flight.

Sneaky photo of other larny Business Class passengers	I did some damage to that buffet
Boxes of gear near the helis, looking towards mine	Main road into mine – our containers are just to the right of the truck

The flight was followed by a 2 hour drive (at night – by a fearless and suicidal – read Saudi – driver) to one camp where I spent the night and was only fetched at 7pm the following evening to be taken to the camp we’re flying from. What a trip! Apparently I had just missed the serious rains where almost everything flooded (so much so that I was informed that the new evacuation plan was to try to get across a small stream – which apparently would wash you away during a heavy rain – and fly the choppers up to higher ground. Hmm… I see a problem. Still, the very flat terrain we are in hopefully would mean that it floods everywhere and therefore not too high. We’ll see.

Have fuel tanker, will fly!	Couldn’t find out what these are, but they’re everywhere
Mud cracks in the powder sand	There was a massive area that flooded – and there isn’t much of a catchment area nearby…

Our small containers have been positioned literally RIGHT outside the security fence of the active mine, but we eat in the mine’s canteen. The food is surprisingly better than the last camp. While there is still plenty rice and a “limitlessss” amount of chicken, there is also more of a selection and yesterday I had an awesome chicken stew-type thing. Much better!

Main entrance to mine – with mosque front and centre	Our containers with aircon, small bathrooms and dust
No photographs!	Condiments. Fish flavoured sauce – seriously!?

Breakfast is at 5am (yawn!) where after we pre-flight, fire up and head out to the survey areas. Our fuel caches are usually very remote (if they’re too close to people fuel pumps etc. get stolen – even in Saudi, can you believe it?!) although they do need to be near a large enough road for our truck to reach us with drums of fuel. I found our current one (pics below) and was particularly proud of it as its in a bowl and hidden from everyone! I expect to see the Mars Rover at any moment…

“There seems to be no sign of intelligent life anywhere”	A well constructed fuel cache
Nothing for miles around – and yet car tracks EVERYWHERE throughout the desert

Afternoons are pretty much paperwork moments (so much computer “paperwork”) and movies. One afternoon in my container I felt the wind start howling outside. The extractor fan in my en suite (excuse me!) began spinning in the wrong direction and all the cold air from my aircon was blown out under the front door. I opened the door and saw what I photographed in the first pic below. Within 5 mins the container was rocking and I opened the door again, got both eyes filled with sand and snapped the second picture! A massive thunderstorm followed – which thankfully wasn’t big enough to wash us away (I wasn’t going to attempt fording any raging streams in that weather!) and then all was calm, and hot, again.

Looks a bit hazy out there today…	What the hell?! I was getting sand in my eyes sitting in my room
You can’t see the exfoliating sand layer on my soap

… and not a moment too soon…

Yes please!! Into the final week before heading home. I don’t like to get myself excited about going home as it can make the being here part painful, so I prefer to try to ignore the fact that I’ll be leaving and I don’t start counting days. But now its so close I can’t help myself. The day after tomorrow I’ll be in Jeddah for the day, and on Saturday at 5am AST I’ll be on the plane heading home.

Its been a decent tour, but I think the size of the group with three helicopters and 4 pilots all vying for flying time has meant a lot of sitting around doing nothing. The never changing chicken and rice combo doesn’t help. On the plus side, I haven’t eaten so much fruit in my life! A banana, apple and pear pretty much every day.

These guys “farm” out here all alone – no-one else for miles! A few sheep/goats and camels	The morning the rains began… Clouds building thick and fast to the west

Anyway, not much more to tell except, in the final week I am here, the rain (that apparently hasn’t come for three years) has finally arrived. We had a few days with partly cloudy skies (where the hell did the moisture for those clouds come from?!) and three or four days ago a monster black cloud started building from the west in the afternoon. The coast is on the west and there is a steep escarpment very much like the Drakensberg up into the hills that we are flying in. So I don’t think we have to wonder too long about how the rain got here!

After a small shower the hills look very shiny and bright	And then a monster cloud started moving closer

Since then each afternoon has a number of very big storms in the area (way larger than we had in Zambia, oddly enough) and the rivers have all started to flow. I know flash floods are a serious thing here – one of our loops we leave at a remote site to save having to ferry it into the survey area, and we’ve left it on top of a small rise, well above the stream by a good 5-10m. And yesterday morning the crew that flew out there reported that the whole system had been flooded completely! Presumably they had a huge storm there and the flash flood washed over the high ground that the loop was lying on. Fortunately the more critical components are more or less watertight so there was no damage, but we were all surprised at how much water must have flowed to engulf the loop. The ground is just so hard-baked that the water doesn’t soak into it. We had water puddles in camp that were still there three days after the rain we had – even the sun during the day couldn’t evaporate them dry.

It sounded like hard rain on the metal roofs	A desert full of hail stones! For about 5 minutes

So the rain has come just in time for my departure. I have finished all the flying I am going to do this tour, so all I have to do is pack and leave. It also seems that this survey block is a few days from being completed and then everything will need to be dismantled and trucked to the next block, built back up again and the work will continue.

The next morning was almost clear (and cold)

For those of you in Durban, I’ll be seeing you soon. Apparently I have a party on the 13th I’ve been invited to.

Retail therapy in Riyadh

 

Finally the day arrived (sod’s law, right after a weekend of no flying) and I jetted off to Riyadh for the second meeting with the military where we hoped all our permissions would be granted for the remainder of the project. The drive from the airport towards town goes straight past the local university with male and female residences on either side of the campus. Presumably being caught anywhere near the residences of the opposite sex would result in a stoning, whipping or beheading. I stayed in the taxi. The university ground is apparently 26km long, so said my chatty taxi driver.

Water feature in Riyadh airport	Foyer of the Boudl Wurood

I was hoping to be able to do a little shopping in Riyadh and hoped that the hotel wasn’t too far from civilisation. The city (and the same goes for Jeddah) is in a very strict grid pattern. There are very few bends and curves in the wide, multi-lane roads. Riyadh being the size it is, I could very well have been booked into a hotel in a rundown residential area, far from shops and the like. How lucky I was then that I was booked into the one of the Boudl Hotels – its a middle-eastern hotel chain. It was the newest addition to the Boudl chain and so was sparkly new and very posh-looking.

Bloody luxury	Could quite happily have been based here for 2 months

I loved my room with small lounge area next to the bed, kitchenette with microwave, hot plates etc. Not that I really used any of it, truth be told. I was far too focussed on the shopping. And lo, not 2km from my hotel (well, about 500m across a busy highway which I had to cross via a bridge 1km away) was Jarir Bookstore – another large chain, this time of stationary stores, which was also reputed to sell computers and tablets at good prices. And right next to that was a Carrefour – a French hypermarket similar to Game, which I could compare prices with.

Harley Davidson, Riyadh	Parking area being dug up – interesting to see ALL diggers working rather than only one with everyone else standing and watching

So, on the evening after I arrived in Riyadh I managed to purchase 1 laptop, 1 iPad mini and 1 flash stick. Booyaah! Sadly none for me, but I pretended that they were and loved the shopping. I also bought a Harley Davidson baseball cap from the HD store down the street for Chief Pilot, Pierre who has just bought a monster bike and already had a Jeddah t-shirt.

Seems they follow traffic rules as closely as they follow spelling rules	Downtown Riyadh – lots of construction

The meeting wasn’t too painful and it looks like on the whole everything was sorted. I found it interesting that while most of the top brass at the meeting presented themselves as hard and difficult with regards to our requests, a number of them came to us quietly and told us what to say to make things happen smoother. Not to lie or be dishonest, but how to word what we wanted so that we stood a better chance of getting the permissions we needed. On the whole they were very nice, decent people.

Downtown Riyadh – like the city is only being built now	Every building downtown has a crane or three on it

Being in the building of military aerial intelligence I didn’t think it prudent to start snapping pics for my blog, so nothing here – but it was a massive building that was almost completely empty in the middle. The offices lined two of three walls (the building is wedge-shaped), four storeys high, but about 60% of the building was a huge, empty atrium from ground to roof. Very strange.

One of few buildings without a construction crane on top of it	Some apartment blocks on the outskirts of Riyadh

My next mission was to get my visa renewed in Jeddah. Since I needed my passport for travel I had to fly to Jeddah personally to hand the passport in. One is only allowed in the country for 30 days at a time, but can get that period extended under certain circumstances. The fine for overstaying a visa is around R25 000!! So definitely worth the extra flight and accommodation in Jeddah to get it sorted. The bonus was that I didn’t have to go in person, but could give my passport to an agent to do it for me, leaving me with a few days with nothing to do except wander around the streets and malls of Jeddah. Oh what a trial!

Clearly shop clothing posters can’t show model’s faces	Most stores have mannequins rather than picture posters

It does seem that their visa division is very much like our Home Affairs Department, in that nothing was done the first day, giving me a second day in Jeddah, and by the end of the second day we were told that there was a power failure in the visa offices and so they couldn’t renew my visa anyway, but would grant me an extension for a week. So I got over 2 full days in Jeddah before flying back to camp and handing my passport to a guy who will drop it off when he flies back out through Jeddah for his home in a few days. So complicated.

Derelict shopping mall	Everything boarded up and empty

Having those two days in Jeddah was great. I was pretty lost, and in a very run-down, dodgy part of town away from pretty much everything worthwhile. But I was prepared to walk, and walk I did. I found a mall on Google Maps and walked the 2km only to discover a massive mall looking very grotty, run down and shut! Don’t know when it was last open but all the shops in it were empty and there was a Planet Hollywood sign outside, suggesting its been closed for a while. So I caught a taxi, not to be outdone, and asked the Arab driver (who spoke absolutely no English) to take me to “big mall to buy”. He nodded and we lurched off into the mass of frantic, unpredictable traffic and headed into the CBD.

A tribute to their driving?	“The Green Island” – grotty hotel/restaurant on stilts

We shot past some lovely old buildings with strong Arabian architecture but with the speed and the swerving I couldn’t get a clear picture. I was deposited by one of the dodgiest small shopping centres I have ever seen. Nervously I got out and walked with speed inside. This is certainly where the local working class shop. Good deals on numerous items, and right next to proper souks which were a bit too crowded for comfort. I did, after all, stand out like a beacon of wealth and feared for both my wallet and my virtue…

Small concrete buttresses affording many sun downer spots – spot the cats in foreground	The Jeddah Hilton and others
The one place where palm tree cell towers fit in – even if they’re much bigger & healthier looking than the real ones…	Apartment block along the beachfront

But I walked most of the way back to the hotel along the waterfront. They call it the Corniche and its a promenade, similar to Durban’s, which is 35km long. I was down towards the docks, so didn’t see very much, but the following day I caught a cab all the way across town to the more affluent waterfront where all the 5 star hotels are. I went in the late afternoon and walked over 10km along the waterfront as the sun set. Very strange to see how the Arabs treat the evening as we do the day. Many of them were sat out on little concrete buttresses into the Red Sea, watching the sunset with their families or friends. And without a single proper sun downers drink between them!

Sunset – see how the sun sets into the dust a good 1.5 diameters before the horizon (clearer in the next pic)	Microlights and gyrocopters flew up and down the coastline until too dark to fly

The waterfront was also crawling with wild cats. I must have seen hundreds and I wasn’t particularly looking – they were just literally under foot. I felt terrible for them - half starved and mangy. And a few tiny kittens “mewing” as I walked past.

Very strange – what looks like a smaller version of the White House under a large hangar roof	Twilight along the coast

I watched the sun set and continued walking south towards town, when the town criers started up and a few of the mosques on the water’s edge began to fill up with men. However, many of the people sitting at the beach simply rolled their own prayer mats out on the pavement and started praying right in front of everyone.

How well positioned is this mosque	Sneaky pic of a guy praying on the pavement
Mövenpick Hotel on a small island	Another monument on a traffic circle

Once it got completely dark I stopped for supper before continuing towards town along the waterfront, and noted how the locals were all out in force with their kids rollerblading, cycling etc. along the promenade or playing on the jungle gyms and swings in the kids play areas. The street lights weren’t very bright but in the semi-darkness families were hanging out as we would during the day, when you could at least see which child you were taking home with you at the end. Funny how a few lost hours during the day can completely transform a daily routine. I would have thought a working day broken in the middle and then running up until past 11pm before starting again at 8am would be extremely disruptive to one’s sleep patterns, but they’ve been doing it here for centuries and clearly cope fine.

Prayer mats laid out on the pavement	The Eiffel Tower – a model
King Fahd’s Fountain – 320m high

The final discovery in Jeddah was while I was being driven back to the hotel in a cab. They have a water fountain which shoots water at a speed of 375km/h over 320m into the air! Over 1000ft, which is taller than the Eiffel Tower! Its the highest fountain in the world and you can see it at night when its lit up with 500 spotlights, from all over the city. Sadly my picture was taken from the highway when the taxi driver stopped quickly for me when he saw what I was trying to snap. Far too far away to show it properly, but trust me, its incredibly high. Apparently there are over 18 tons of water in the air at any one time.

The following morning I caught a flight back to Bisha, and a car trip back to camp, where I had another big shock. I always assumed the petrol would be much cheaper here than in S Afr, but as we filled up the car I worked out (and I double checked my maths!) that their fuel is R1.50 a litre!!! Its cheaper than water! By a lot!