Life is a Beach

I was invited to go on a trip to the local tourist beach in Luba on Sunday, I wasn’t sure what was involved but I thought a few hours away from the plant would be good anyway. I got ready at 10.30am Sunday morning and put on shorts and T-shirt and some money thinking we may have to eat out there. I was picked up and driven to the Marathon camp where the bus was going to pick us all up and take us, we got on the bus at the allotted time and we were told some of the guys had only just arrived back from a night out in town, so probably very drunk and tired and not very sociable I was wondering, we waited a good while and when they had all arrived we were then informed we had to go and pick up the beer and food, we went to one house to get some beer and then another house to pick up someone else and more food then another apartment for more food and salads that had been prepared, this was something I wasn’t expecting a complete picnic style beach party. As we set off as we got to the gate we then found one of the guys hadn’t brought his gate pass so couldn’t leave, this meant driving back like lost tourists to the first house to get a pass, now this was taking so much time, we had been driving around picking up stuff and guys for 1 and a half hours, it was now 12.30. One of the guys had launched into large vodka and red-bull drinks while picking up the food and beer and by the time we left the camp 1 ½ hours later he was really drunk to the point of slurring and talking drunken crap, I wasn’t amused at this point. Everyone else was taking beers and having fun which isn’t too bad, they were playing loud African style music and then shouting above the music , not my favourite past time.
We set of and then I was informed we were going into Malabo to get bread, now this sounded very strange and I was thinking I had made a mistake in accepting the gift Trojan horse, during the drive around Malabo to get to the bakery I was exposed to the town during daylight and I was horrified by the dreadful poverty of the place, large shanty towns and piles of garbage everywhere. Just shocking, really, and we ended up at a bakery where all the bakers were wearing what you would call shanty town clothing for the baking, not a great appetiser. All of the young guys were flour covered and were shirtless and looked really poor but then I realised that everyone in the street were staring at the bus we were all sat in. It felt strange to have all these people in the street staring at us and it was the start of what was going to happen all day to us, they have many oil related workers in Malabo but to them we are really strange folks with bizarre sun glasses and fat mostly, here most people are very thin and look ill and underfed. We took about 10 minutes to get the bread and then set off and then I heard the guys mentioning they were picking up another guy from town, so we went into Shantyville again and went to some not too poor looking houses and found a large group of very happy people waiting with children and many young men and girls that we then squeezed the guy, his family with children and sisters and brothers and friends onto the already fullish bus, and now 2 ½ hours later we finally set off for the beach. The trip what I thought was only 20 minutes down the road took and hour, but we drove out along a very nice road through what looked like virgin jungle and arrived at a tiny beach with about 20 shacks built amongst the trees. There were already a group of engineers here from my project and the security officer whose turn it was to provide safety for the foreign oil workers. We all unpacked the beer and the food and while a large group of the guys went into the sea, that was a murky brown colour and not that warm,
There was a samll group of Korean workers, probably engineers for some oil project and they were behaving as though they had been eating magic mushrooms all morning, they were running up and down the beach only wearing underpants, not nice underpants but those horrible worn out baggy type with the elastic strecthed in the leg so they were hanging all baggy and ugly, but what was more bizaare was the games they were playing, one older guy was throwing large handfuls of sand onto the heads of the other while it was photographed, this obviously plunged into throwing large handfuls of sand at each other while running at high speed across a very crowded beach, it looked ridiculous but not surprising of Korans actually.

I stuffed my face with fresh bread with roast beef that was very nice, I had a few beers but all the time I was being watched by all the locals who were intent on seeing how a white man eats his sandwiches. I found it a bit disconcerting at first but then a bit irritating, we had the local alcoholic come along and ask for beer, he was told by the large Australian guy NO, very loud several times and he didn’t come back, we ate and drank for about 3 hours as that was all we had left of the day. It did rain for a while and we had to shelter under the front veranda of the local beer shed as that is all you could call it, we were watched intently by the locals who would point and whisper to each other, perhaps it was the sequined full swimsuit I was wearing or the floral display I had in my hair but I didn’t care, life is too short to not come out of the closet and enjoy yourself in Dark Africa where no-one knows you, actually I was wearing swim shorts, but I had you going for a minute there. We headed back along the jungle road and I felt relaxed finally, the initial set-off was a nightmare of organisation but once we got to the place, it felt like a picnic and everyone was having a laugh, apart from the guy who was so drunk he couldn’t talk, and then he slept all the way back to the camp. He spoiled himself in the first hour and then missed all the fun, I got the impression he was deeply miserable inside and needed to eliminate all the demons running around in his head by medicating himself with large doses of knockout vodka, but he could also be that other thing I have spoken about before an alcoholic engineer, just slowly wallowing in misery while always away from home if he has a home or a wife. This is something I am going to avoid as my plans don’t include doing this for many more years full time.