New Years Eve In Qatar

Well i wasn't expecting much for new years eve as it is a small town and no real bars but my hotel has a cocktail club and a sports bar and a sort of disco bar thing, but they said they were having a party in the disco bar thing and the price was 30 dollars, i had no choice to either stay in my room feeling like shooting myself or go to the disco new years eve party. the place was packed after i got in about 9pm after my shopping expedition. but packed with miserable Indian men all desperately looking for some company, they will be shit outta luck in this town. Also there place was full of young Qataris and very amusing it was too to see their attempts at dancing to western music, which was being played by two DJ's from London, pretty average they were two, and probably they made alot of money for it also. anyhow these young qataris who have tons of money were strutting their stuff on the dance floor and all looking like Borat, they had no timing no style and all had crazy arabian nights facial hair or variations of it. but at least these guys did have enough money to have a girlfriend, and i think there is going to be a lot of local girls who will be maiden aunts in Qatar as all these young qataris had Philipino girlfriends, all of the girls they were with were philipino or malaysian, hard to tell the difference. no one long black gown was seen all night. This is a major cultural change that the older generation had never seen coming, that their children may prefer a girl who they had seen before and had even spoken to before and even dated and liked, how they are going to come to terms with this I dont know. only the future will tell. anyhow the night progressed and beer was drunk and large groups of philipino guys and with their girlfriends danced, there was even a few gay philipino guys dancing together, nothing out of the ordinary for the middle east there, and it was a pleasant if not exciting night out, we brought in the new year, i danced a little bit and had a few beers, very expensive beers, and left at about 1am, as i had to get up for work in the morning and when i went to the rear entrance of the hotel it was locked, the front entrance was a 15 minute walk around the entire block, i was pissed off to say the least, what a finale for the year of 2006, i was in the club for 4 hours and didn't speak to anyone. this town isn't for lonely men, you will not meet friends out of work, this town is purely for work and taking your wife of girlfriend along. ah well i may only have 14 days more left to spend in this dusty windswept country and then i go back to Buddha's own back garden of Costa Rica to play with my Hummingbirds, the more i travel the more i realise that there are very few nice places in this planet, and i fortunately have been lucky enough to now live in one of them.

My first 5 days in Qatar

I have been working here for 5 days now and this project is the biggest plant of its type in the world, the scale of it is staggering, there are 40,000 workers on the plants here mostly Indian construction guys. I am just babysitting a fully commissioned unit and just keeping it running when the plant runs and not much else, I have spoken to the engineers here about getting a proper job with them and they have given me the names and addresses of the right people and I hope to speak to them in the new year. I think that Doha will be a good place to work and live and it is pretty cheap for buying stuff, electronic and cars and other essential toys. I went round doing some "toy" shopping and the prices are half as the indian shops really only sell to the poor indian construction guys, when i was walking round i was amazed that the indian guys gather at night to chat and get cold in the wind, but in number you would only find gathering at a football match, thousands of them in the poor area of town where they all live, all dresses in crazy combinations with things wrapped around their heads to keep out the wind. I went for a meal in a local indian restaurant there and the waiter was shocked to find a white guy wanting to eat there, staring in disbelief. I asked a few questions and was told to order the meat masala, why i dont know but i agreed, and then i ordered the tandoori bread, it was fantastic , and the best part of it was the price. 3 dollars. one thing i have noticed is you never see any women here ever, only the few philipino workers in the hotels. you see the local qataris driving their big 4X4's but never any women. when i flew from Dammam in Saudi to Doha, a load of local women got on the plane and they were all wearing the full head to toe black gown and full face mask, i found it very strange,
so Qatar is nothing but work and cheap toys, what else does life hold for anyone other than making money to play with toys anyway.

Initial Impressions of Qatar

Well i am again very surprised with what i have found, nothing ever fits your preconceived ideas. the city of Doha is all very new, i have been told that 10 years ago there was nothing at all here other than 3 Indian supermarkets. so this town is really new. This is the middle east and it is hot isn't it????, wrong, this is winter and the wind is blowing from Sakhalin so it feels , it is cold and windy and miserable, i wanted heat for Gawds sake, I didnt even bring a sweater or a jacket, i have been walking around freezing my ass off. so i had no idea about what the countryside was like, now i know, it is totally flat and just sand, nothing but flat sand from coast to coast, virtually no green matter a few trees and a few palm trees in the city. this is a non countryside, totally lacking in any features.






Again as the desert it would be dry wouldnt it, wrong, they tell me it has been raining all December and there were pools around the airport and all the cars were mud splattered, what a shock for me. the rain and the cold and the wind, Jeez this is a miserable place in winter, only 1 step away from Sakhalin.

Flying to Qatar Billious Class

Flying to Qatar in business class you would think would be OK, and to be honest the planes were Continental and KLM were nice and the staff were very attentive but something wasn't right with the food and after the first flight i was feeling off, not quite right, i wasn't hungry and feeling bloated and didn't even eat much, i took the best part of two days minus the 9 hours time difference, and i got to my hotel at midnight, i slept crap as normal you would say and had to get up at 5.30am after that horrible journey and arrived at site not feeling to bad but all upset stomach wise and after an hour or so i had what can only be described as a misfunctioning bowels of the highest magnitude and that left me feeling very ill, i was shivering and sweating and aching and i had to go to the clinic to let the Doc look at me, we decided that i was suffering bad food poisoning and to be fair my company did pay many thousands of dollars for my flight so you would only expect the best form of food poisoning, i went back to the hotel that night and was so very empty and miserable, i tried to watch TV but at about 10pm i was feeling starving and went to the hotels own Indian restaurant and i had a huge wonderful Rogan Josh with a nan bread baked in front of me on the roving tandoor cooker, it was fun and tasted fantastic, i felt much better after that but felt ill when i saw the bill, it was nearly 30 dollars, for rice and bread and a tiny dish of lamb and sauce, what the hell this is the middle east.

Costa Rica at Christmas Time

Well you may realise that Costa Rica isn’t such a bad place to live, if you have money that is. The weather here in December is what you call transitional from wet season to dry and at present it is non-committal, but some days are just blisteringly hot and today seems to be one of those days, I have taken to walking around the tiled floors of the house barefoot as it can take a little of the heat out of my feet while walking around but after a long hot day and the house gets warm even the floors start to feel warm to the feet. Yet I do not complain as I am now a reptile and love the feel hot. Well my new job may have gone away as they became very cheap and even after we had agreed a figure for the salary they then withdrew it and offered me a lower figure and I said no thank you, this is the negotiations of a giant oil company, I don’t think I would have trusted them after that carry on, so I am back to travelling again and my next destination is Qatar on the 28th of December. I am actually looking forward to staying there as I am working out of a nice hotel and this to me is real engineering. Eating nice food and sleeping in a nice bed and getting a beer when you want and having a rental car and feeling important, over the last 3 years I have felt like a cheap peasant labourer living in shitty rooms in camp. So Qatar is going to be a refreshing change and I hope I can get a rotation job out of it, we will see how the thing goes. So I have to squeeze into my next few days as much as I can as that day of travel is looming very quickly. Christmas doesn’t seem the same when the sun s shining and it is hot and lovely, must feel like the same in Australia as they have the Christmas dinner on the beach. But one has to make sacrifices when having the life of a travelling engineer.

December in Costa Rica

Well life here in Costa Rica in December on my extended holiday is very nice thankyou very much. I got up to a grey sky and it looked pretty miserable outside, the little girl was asking to go to the playground and we got there for 8am. The wind was warm and nice and this is winter time, i thank the lord Buddha for letting me live in such a nice place. I am still trying to negotiate my contract with the people in Qatar but they are nit picking at the details and i have no start date set, in the mean time my present company has decided to send me to Qatar to work for them for a while which is nice as it lets me take a good look at the place before i decide on anything with the others and to top it off there is the chance of a a different and higher paying job in Yemen which will allow me to keep rotating and stay in Costa Rica, this may be my preferred option after all.
I had a huge shock when my laptop died on me just before i left Russia, i wasnt worried about loosing any material as i am able to recover all the data via an adaptor for the hard drive to another external HDD. So i could get all my pictures and software and all the other good stuff that makes life more acceptable when living in a hotel or camp. My company is preparing to send me a new laptop to Qatar to great me but not sure what it is going to be or when i am going to get hold of it.
I am still trying to organise my travel plans to a wedding in Florida in March which is my next trip to anywhere. I will have to shuffle my rotations with someone to allow me to get to see my od buddy get hitched or manacled whichever you want to say.

Hawaiian Hula Hula Holiday

Happy Hawaii, what a fantastic place to go for a vacation of a lifetime, only thing is that I have done these sort of places before and I cannot get to excited about it, life as an old fart is tiresome, getting there was a complete pain in the ass, I had to get to the airport really early in Costa Rica and do a silly flight the wrong way to Miami as that is American Airways immigration centre, when we were waiting at the airport I saw the most bizarre activity by a waiting passenger for the flight, probably the most ridiculous thing I have ever seen in an airport, a guy was actually doing the salsa alone up and down the aisles, spinning around and flashing his legs out like a pro Latin-American dancer. He looked really stupid, I think he had used the last of his cocaine in the taxi to the airport. So we landed in Miami did the standing in line thing and then got on our flight to Los Angeles. We were late taking off and we had to buy a goddam sandwich on the plane as food now costs, cheap-ass bankrupt airlines. Anyway we were on a tight schedule and when we landed there was another delay on the taxiway and when we got to the lounge we were the last ones on the plane, I was worried about the luggage. We didn’t even have time to go and buy a Big Mac for the flight , we again had to buy a goddam chicken wrap on the third flight of the day, we were having a low-cal day.
We arrived in Maui to be met by our friend unexpectedly, he never said he was picking us up. He gave us a lei, the typical flower garland and even though we were worn out from the flights, we spent the next 5 hours chatting and laughing and loving the warm climate and lovely fresh air of a Hawaiian evening. Our bedroom was the porch with fly-screens and overlooking the golf course.

Now everything you have read and seen about Hawaii is pretty misleading, other than the fact it is sunny and warm all year round and the sea is warm and full of sharks and turtles.

Maui is an island of 2 volcanoes with a large valley




The islands have tons of rain, Maui has No1 & 2 wettest spots in the world so they say, 40 feet of rain a year at the top of the large volcanic remnants, but the winds only drop it on the windward side, so that side is lush and verdant and the other is dry and desert like, this to me was very strange, but tropical islands are interesting strange places anyway

Crazy Volcanic ash cones all over the place



at least being part of the USA I was able to go shopping at Walmart and I prepared for the event of the holiday, buying shoes and clothes in Walmart as I brought 2 extra holdalls in the suitcases. I got a lot of socks, and some bits and pieces and rechargeable batteries as the ones we got in the UK had basically expired after 3 charges, cheap-ass French batteries, don’t buy uniross batteries.

Our holiday was fantastic, we got a free stay at our friends house, they were the perfect hosts, Eugenia was attempting to make me as fat as the local Hawaiians and was cooking great meals, they also lent us there third car so we didn’t have to hire one, saving possibly $1000, and we drove around the entire island,

Rainy West Maui, large volcano



it was fantastic, a very beautiful part of the world, only problem is that it is terrifically popular with lots of Americans also and this is making it a boom town for developers and they are building everywhere, nothing is sacred.

We went snorkelling and saw a couple of Turtles and no sharks, when we went to the Molokini Island, a small caldera in the bay, it was like Piccadilly circus, there was 8 boats and perhaps 500 snorkellers, we just frightened away all the fish I think, the week before we went though a swimmer had been bitten by a shark just 30 feet out into the water.

Fantastic snorkelling in the warm waters




One huge problem with the islands is that it is inundated with non native species of animals and birds, it is the extinction capitol of the USA, over half the species of birds are gone for good and wild cats are breeding like crazy, goats eat all the plants and wild pigs are also a major threat, luckily there are no snakes yet, to wipe out the rest of the birds but the birds you do see are all introduced by the British and lately by immigrants from the mainland, Mynah birds from India are everywhere, as are the pigeons, millions of these beautiful little doves, and cardinals and turkeys and crazy Chukkars that run about on the roads, not flying out of the way of traffic and the most crazy thing of all was the incredible number of Ford Mustangs being hired out, there must be millions of them also, the favourite of the US tourists, the drive across the top of the island was fantastic, like a drive through the hills of my home country, all very twisty and turny, so all the city dwellers from the US couldn’t handle the turns, “what do you mean I have to turn the wheel of my car”. Not a straight line in 50 miles, they were driving at 10 mph, now that is far too slow in anyone’s book, I know the speed limit was 10 mph but that is to save these drivers who are used to straight roads from crashing off the cliffs into the sea, I was powering away in my Subaru overtaking everyone, over the no overtaking lines, what a great drive it was.

Great Tropical Beaches on all coasts




The last earthquake there had broken a bridge to some nice waterfalls and we couldn’t go to see them and it was very dry while we were there, only 2 hours of rain in the whole 2 weeks. So the creeks were dry and hence no waterfalls. We will definitely go again sometime and travel to the other islands to see some of the other crazy things like the tallest sea cliffs in the world, the ones used for Jurassic park. Maybe some other snorkelling, we did see the sharks in the giant aquarium, that was a good place to see the fish, nice and safely.



Flight home was pretty uneventful other than a major snowstorm hacked across the USA and cancelled lots of flights in Dallas , but as we were going to the warm sunny Costa Rica we didn’t get held up and we bought a big mac for the flight home and guess what, they supplied us with a free hot meal, so we had to eat both on the flight, it’s a hard life.