'My' Latest Photos

I just posted many photos. Some of our camp move, and some of my trip to sand dunes at this prospect. Unfortunately my camera got ran over by a truck a week ago, so none of these photos are mine. They are from Andy, a coworker who also loves to take pictures. He takes a lot of good pictures of people, which I rarely do out here. So, you'll get to see some people. And that is good.

(If you click on the picture links using the right mouse button you will get an option to "Open in New Window". That will make it more convenient to look at the pictures. )

There are a few pictures here, here and here of Omani and Indian guys cooking outside in the middle of the desert. When we stopped for lunch the first day, I ate my packed sandwich and chips. The Omani truckers pulled out a carpet, a bench, a big pot, some utensils, lit a fire using generous quantities of gasolene, and started chopping vegetables. A lot of the truckers we hired for the camp move live in their trucks. The make for a strange/modern kind of bedou - nomadic, but no camels. I got to try some "camp move chili" (you can see here) and some Indian style tea. Both were prepared on the side of the highway, in the middle of empty desert, using gasolene soaked wood, in the shade of a giant tractor trailer. One of these guys could add a very interesting post to Georgia's blog.

I added some pictures of where we stayed the first night. We just stopped 20 some trucks on the side of the highway in the middle of nowhere. We had a nice dinner and some beer. The beer helped us fall asleep despite the fact that there was no airconditioning, and we were in a location where a few hours earlier it had been 120F degrees.



This picture was taken that night. In it you can see some characters from the crew and put some faces to the names of people I may have mentioned.
From the left:
1) Andy the photographer. He's also Australian and the assistant project manager. He's from a town that is actually named "Surfer's Paradise"
2) Steve the Australian project manager - a real jokester
3) Keith british mechanic. He has a really excellent British accent, but it always seems a little out of place on Keith who's a mechanic and has tattoos and is a ladies man back home in the UK.
4) Selah the Philadelphian QC - she makes very nice origami pigs.
5) John Robison, the Australian client representative who, during his leave, goes home to Malaysia and runs a scuba diving company - no fair.

Here is another picture. From the left:
1)Ash the medic, not a hundred percent sure, but I think he's from India.
2)Ibrahim, or "Ibs", the camp boss and a very happy guy. He's from Oman.
3)Ravi a very nice and funny guy, although he really like to lecture me on the evils of America especially after a couple beers. Ravi's from India.
4)Hamish the senior QC, he's New Zealandish and he is a master of one liners.
5)The rest you saw in the previous picture.

And there are also some pictures of my first trip to sand dunes. Sand dunes are COOL! Here is me playing Golf.

That is all...thanks for reading:)

I Can See You

Although I try not to add random shit to this blog that is not about Oman, I thought this was cool enough to make an exception. If you click on the link it will map the locations of last 100 visitors to this blog. It will be embarassing when 80% of those visitors are me...but oh well.

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Golf on a Sanddune

Sorry I havn't written for a while. I've been destracted by other things.

We had a camp move a week ago. Picked the entire camp up and drove northwest for 2 days. Now we're shooting in the Hazar oil field, about 40mi from the Saudi border and right on the edge of 100's of miles of sanddunes. It's sort of close to the town of Bahja, but really it's not close to anywhere. The temperature reached 125 F the other day.

Today I got to visit the sanddunes for the first time. They are very very cool. The sand dunes around here are 40m high. Everyone feels the need to comment on how short that is, but I think that's pretty tall. The ground surrounding them is completely flat. It's also covered in white stones while the sanddune sand is pretty red, so that makes for a stark contrast. Looks like someone dumped a pile of dirt on the kitchen floor. If you look at google earth you can see them and how strange they look.

I wandered around with my coworker Andy, who gets to drive around all the time - I'm jealous. The best part was when we played golf. I think that is one of the coolest/strangest things I've ever done - played golf in a location like that.

Eating a Camel

Last night we ate a camel.

It was a small camel, only a year and a half. They walked it into camp alive the night before and they butchered it right there. You have to slit its throat in a particular way for the meat to be "halal" (the Arabic version of kosher). I didn't actually see all this, but I was told about it.

Camel meat is pretty good. It's stringy in a way that reminds me of a hunk of stewed corned beef. There is no marbling of fat, like on a steak, but the meat itself is a little oily (could have been the way they cooked it too). I was served mine from a giant stewing pot that served over 100 people. You ate with your hands. The meat was spiced lightly with cardemum. Tasted a little like lamb or deer, red meat with some flavor. There was a little piece of camel fur left on one of my pieces, it made me sad.

PS. While looking up halal, I found that the eating roadkill is also forbidden in Islamic law. Maybe if I order roadkill for breakfast they will have to serve it to me with a specially marked plate and untensils, like when I order bacon.