In the days leading up to the move my schedule was a little off because I was switching from working nights. Because of this I easily woke up at 3:30am the morning of the move, got a shower and headed to the office where Nurul and Fabian, my respectively Bangladeshi and French coworkers were just about to begin the two page procedure for shutting down "the system". We shutdown, we unplugged, we packed, we found a tennis ball that had been lost for 6 months, threw things in drawers, threw things in trashcans. When everything was in boxes and shoved up against one wall, we went around and duck taped all the shelves and drawers shut.
As we finished packing our office, the first camp move trucks arrived and proceeded to load their cargo. Their cargo consisted of a 50 ton triple-wide trailers. The loading of these trailers is a balancing act worthy of a circus, complete with dangerous wobbling from side to side. The first truck made quite a spectacle as it tried to lift the mechanics workshop complex. Twice it got stuck with the workshop half loaded and the trucks front wheels lifted 8 feet in the air due to the weight of the load. All the while, a tiny man in blue coveralls is emphatically waving instructions to the driver. After the first failures, they had to get TWO trucks, one in front of the other like a train. They attached the miniature truck train to the workshop via 2inch thick steel cable and pulled everything 30ft forward so the origional truck could drive around to the other side and try again to lift the workshop, this time from behind. Forty five minutes later, the ordeal came to a conclusion as the workshop was finally loaded onto a truck, and then transfered to one of the larger carrier trucks. At the very moment of triumph it hit me that there were 19 remaining trailers and it was going to be a long day.
At this point I began the next phase of the day which consisted of wandering around and taking random pictures. First pictures of campmove related events... then close ups of big trucks... then mud splatters on the trucks.. then cool shapes in the sand. I made a friend with an Omani who I didn't recognize when he said "hey selah" and invited me for a cup of Omani tea. His name was Mubarak and he is a cargo truck driver. There was another guy too. Omani tea is pretty tasty, black tea mixed tasty herbs and lots of condensed milk and sugar. We chatted. One of the guys in his hometown has 48 children and four wives. Mubarak said he has seven children and then paused and corrected himself, "eight actually". He and the other guy showed me some pictures of their families as well as an ostrich and some camels. I shared a few pictures from of my fat cat Meow Meow and my friend Carolyn wearing an Oman t-shirt.
Later I crossed paths with Agata, the other girl on the crew. She's my age and from Poland. She just finished school in Poland and started working for our company just outside of London. After never having been outside of Europe, she's traveled to both Singapore and Oman in the last two weeks. She's still got the travel buzz. We proceeded to wander away from camp and spend several hours hunting shell fossils and taking pictures of plants and lizards. Its special to find someone who likes doing that as much as I do.
When we wandered back through camp, half of the skids had been loaded and left. Ten trucks, each with its 50 ton trailer, had begun a three hour journey to the new campsite at an average speed of 11 miles per hour. And as the crow flies this new campsite is actually only 9 miles away. We caught a ride to the new campsite and took a detour around the convoy, but when we arrived we lost our air conditioned truck seats to some stranded vibrator drivers who needed to start their shift. By this time it had become a hot day, so one of the water truck drivers took pity on us pale skinned females and offered us the air conditioned cab of his water truck. The cab was 10 ft off the ground. He had a cassette of Omani music, so we sat there and watched the empty desert with Bedouin tunes playing in the background.
Later in the day, we watched the loading process in reverse, as they set up our new camp. Me and Agata sat in the shadow of yet another truck and sipped orange drink juice boxes and ate omelet sandwiches. A couple younger Omanis walked by us. One stopped and pointed at my backpack and said "I am drinks"... "I am very drinks" and then looked at me. A couple seconds of silence passed before I realized what he meant. I felt real cool asking "are you thirsty" in Arabic, except I'm sure it sounded more like "it is you are turstee?" with a heavy accent. I gave him a bottle of water, and he had a drink and gave it back and continued on his way.
Unpacking the office was a workout, but it put me in a happy energized mood, the same way a long run or a soccer game does. Our nightshift QC's joined us for the unpacking and afterwards our QC posse sat outside on the boxes that had held our computers and watched the sun go down. We contemplated what we'd do if the electricity didn't come back. We wouldn't be able to go back to work so instead we'd have to go do something else fun like have a campfire in the desert. But alas, the electricity did come back on and we did have to go to work processing a 24 hour backup of data.
Once we got the computers running... we finished the night off with some beers and Ricard at the camp bar. Everyone was a little extra rowdy from the excitement of the day. Any break of routine is excitement out here.
All in all a very nice day.
