'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.

An 8 Hour Bus Ride

I wrote this a few days ago, but never posted it:

I just got to the crew yesterday after my two days of getting paid to sit in Muscat : ) Cause the dirt runway in Nimr is still wet, I ended up taking an 8 hour bus ride instead of the usual 1 hour flight.

I saw date farms. Rows and rows of big palm trees with what looks like giant bunches of yellow-brown grapes. There were this strange brightly colored fruits in a few of them, which I later realized were children. They had shimmied up to pick some dates. Their feet were up next to their hands. All I saw was a curved back dressed in a colorful shirt. Tucked in between the big palm leaves it looked just a fruit.

I discovered a new favorite food. Every 300m of road, throughout Oman, there are little coffee shops with the name "Golden ___ Coffee Shop". You may fill in the blank with a word such as sheep, spoon, castle, goat, camel, etc. They remind me of street vendors in Philly. They sell chicken sandwiches that are to die for. Curried roasted chicken, cucumber, fresh cabbage, sourcream, and hot sauce, all wrapped in a fresh chewy pita. They are small, I'd get 3 for lunch. The shops also always have a variety of smoothies. I get mango. They take the mangos right off the shelf and blend em up with ice and yogurt. Fresh as can be. Such a meal costs around 500 baisa (a buck twenty-five in US money).



At an omani truck stop. I peed in a bathroom that wins the title for "Most Disgusting Bathroom I've Ever Seen". The floor was covered in 1/2cm of brown liquid. The toilet was pit style, just a metal encassed hole in the ground. The wet floor made me fear that some people had missed. I squatted. Then I went to wash my hands. I turned the grimy handle, a cold trickle came out. As I rinsed my hands I realized the water was pouring directly through the drain to the floor.

Now I'm back at crew. I'm currently overwhelmed with work details that I forgot, but I'm sure it will come back in a few days. Its been raining so much over the past couple months that there are toads all over camp. I had a real nice first day of welcomes from everyone. I'm happy its my third shift and I'm not new anymore.

Muscat and Cyclone Gonu

I just returned to Oman after a wonderful 25 day vacation. (imagine a monday multiplied by 10)

I had the unique experience of seeing Muscat one week before Cyclone Gonu hit, and then again two weeks after it hit, as if I were set up to do a scientific before and after comparison.

Before the cyclone hit, I took four days of my vacation to explore Muscat. It was a good time. I went snorkeling. I swallowed a bit of sea water getting the hang of it, but once I got the hang of it, it was great. I saw a sea turtle and lots of pretty fish and lobsters and anemonies. Later, I walked along the beach and saw lots of critters: crabs and clams of varyious shapes and sizes. I braved Ruwi, an older, crowded shopping district where people haggle. I was the only person who was not a dark-skinned male. It felt like walking around in a clown suit.

Another day I tried to drive down the coast to a city named Sur. I only made it halfway. I ended up getting lost...or rather, I got lost many times, and around the 10th time I got lost, it was in this village with a mainstreet the size of a sidewalk. The street was lined with sofas, seated on which were white-bearded Omani grandfathers who were watching kids playing and goats roaming....and the strange foreigner in a rental car. I felt like an intruder driving through someone's living room. After driving through twice in search of the correct turnoff, I just couldn't bear driving through a third time, so I turned back. It was okay, my wanderlust had been well satisfied for the day.

When I came back from Muscat a few days ago, the first evidence of the cyclone I saw was was a Toyota dealership a quarter mile from the office. It was completely destroyed. It resembled a nasty highway pileup involving one thousand cars. Car after car was smashed into the car in front of it. In one place cars were piled three high from the water.



It was raining down south when I arrived in Oman, so the dirt airstrip I usually land on in Nimr was unusable. While waiting for it to dry, I got two (paid) days to explore post-cylone Muscat. Luckly that Toyota dealership close to my office was the worst damage I saw. If the whole city had been as damaged, there wouldn't be much of a city left. The beach, however, was also quite affected. It was 1/3 of its previous size. Parts were completely washed away, causing me to detour through empty city streets. I hardly recognized spots I'd been to before the cyclone. Occasionally, I'd see a storefront I recognized, but the beach itself was completely reshaped. I couldn't find my sandbar with all the hermit crabs : (

I hope the city recovers well. It's so nice to see a thriving friendly city in the Middle East. I've gotten attached to it.

And a side note: Oman makes me feel more bad about global warming. It's a country where they heat is at the limit of what is habitable. If it gets any hotter it will cook the Omanis. Also, since the interior is so desolate, all the life is on the coast, which is exposed to hurricanes and floods and the like. Suck.

an article about the cyclone from Gulf News

Alright, that's all for now.

Lizard Hunting

"If we ever colonize mars it will look a lot like this place". This is largly due to the rocks, which are a martian-like rusty red color. However, I discovered that these very same rocks, when you break them open, are a brilliant white on the inside. Strange.

I made this discovery yesterday when I went with my camera on a lizard hunting expedition. I found two different types of lizard. Both small. Very cute. Their technique for not being eaten by me was to stand very still so I couldn't see them. Despite their efforts I could see them. I didn't eat them, but I got some real good close ups from as near as 6 inches.



Unfortunately I didn't see any of the two foot long "thub" or "dabb" (two transliterations of the same arabic word) lizards that I've heard talked about. I posted some excellent pictures from yesterday of both the lizards and the rocks.

I think yesterday's photos were some of the best I've ever taken, so check them out.

Click Here for Photos