… 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.