To The End of The World

One day later, went into the Exxon office, it was very nice and the level of spoken English was amazing, all the young staff spoke English with so much confidence. Again organised chaos, they assumed I had been issued a pass to travel over the country, it turns out that there is two other David Lowes’ in Exxon and 1 had been here to Sakhalin, so I didn’t have a pass, so I spent three days in the capitol Yuzhno. Had a good look around the city and found it just packed with more cars than people and a buzz that all oil centres around the world have got, the only thing I found miserable was the horrible housing that all the locals have to live in, as you can imagine they are all ex-communist apartment blocks that are all falling down. I also found lots of alcoholics falling about the streets at 11.00am in the morning.

I went for a walk to get some lovely fresh air and it is a nice fresh clean type of air only the arctic has,

I found the local town hall with ornamental military mortars and a children’s play ground that amazingly was full of tanks and military aircraft as playground toys.










local church, very pretty inside also



Church Toilet, oh man it was stinky nearby




It is OK in summer but winter could be really miserable. I got the train up and the journey was incredible, clunking away for 14 hours, didn’t see much over night but the daylight brought a pretty barren landscape of a flat empty place with a scattering of small trees, the soil was sand and I have been told that Sakhalin is just a barren sandy island that housed lots of prisoners up to 20 years ago and was basically a military base, until they found oil and gas that is.






I am still suffering from leftover jetlag and the job is running as planned no real surprises so will update with some pics and other news when something happens.