Night Shift in Oz, making me Feel Really Old

I was hoping to get a normal posting here in Oz and it turned into a trial of endurance, i had already worked 6 weeks on 12 hour shifts getting up at 5.30am, now they put me on night shift, I wasn't happy, the job is easy enough, with very little to do other than watch over the operators carry out loop checks and calibrate valves and stuff, but trying to enjoy the part of the day when I was awake and not at work was hard, we are in a very remote part of Australia and the town is tiny but at least it had a McDonalds, better than the bar food in the hotel, trying to eat a healthy meal is almost impossible, I am eating steak and salad everyday almost, and almost nothing on the night shift, like a bowl of soup as the rest of the food is appalling, so now I wished I hadn't volunteered for this job, it was a stupid and insane thing to do, it was just because it was Australia that I said yes, plus I am a greedy guy who wanted more money as I am planning this third floor extension, well the builder was offering to do the work over the winter, this is dangerous as taking off the roof is exposing your house to ingress of water during the rains, not a safe thing to do, so we have postponed it until the next summer, I have no internet in the hotel, the TV has four crappy channels, the hotel is empty and I have only 2 colleagues in the hotel who I am working with who don't do anything during the day, so all in all a pretty miserable experience for this trip to Oz, some you win and some you lose, this was a bad loser. I am looking at taking off a very long break maybe until next spring to recover my brain and health, I need to lose a few pounds and get some decent sleep, something i need more practice at. next stop Costa Del Sol, Andalusia, Spain. eating sleeping and getting healthy fit and slim not necessarily in that order but something like that.

Life Down Under, Australia

Well I have been here 6 days now and to be honest my brain is worn out with the continuation of long hours and now I am working on night shift, this is totally my own fault for volunteering but I did get to see my old workmates here in Oz, I arrived in Perth at midnight and found the place very cold as it is spring time, in the morning i was flying up to Karratha the skies were grey and it again was cold and I didn't bring any warm clothing at all with me, apart from some denim jeans. I arrived in Karratha to see the blue sunny skies over the semi desert of the northern Pilbara region, it was warm in the day but at night it is windy and again almost fresh but not quite. During the night shift the work is slow as we are just supervising and helping when they have a problem. it is frustrating to find I am not really needed but I have created a lot of problems as home with Jenny my lovely latina wife, she was understandably upset when I postponed my return to go on working for an extra 2 weeks, I have this crazy work head of mine that impels me to work as much as possible as I may go poor, this is crazy but my mother made me like this.

So now i am trying to make amends with Jenny and also plan for taking off the next 3 months to sort out some work on the house and try and get healthy again as I am feeling totally worn out. I need some rest and recreation and some de-stressing.

There is a large old Kangaroo on site that sits around the restaurant and waits for people to feed it, he is so old his ears have no fur left but he seems happy to eat an apple or two. That is life in night shift Oz for now,

Observations of Malaysia

This is my first trip to this particular country, and as it is a tropical part of the world I was expecting something akin to Costa Rica, tropical rainforest, beaches, a nice paradise to work in, I was sadly mistaken. It is a tropical country for sure but the government has deemed it necessary to completely deforest the entire country and turn it into a giant Palm oil plantation. The figure I saw on the internet was 14 million hectares and is growing by tens of thousands of hectares every year, this is a really sad picture to paint as the only beneficiaries are the top elite of this institutionally racist country. It is run by a small group of ultra rich malay muslims, the whole ethos of this country is to keep everything for the muslims and for them. The population is divided into Malays and non malays, that means Chinese and Indian and indigenous peoples, they actively keep jobs and university places for muslims even if they are useless, they are given extra help and money to achieve these aims, this is a shocking system to survive slavery. I was told by some non malays that they are desperate to emigrate to get away from this appalling state of affairs, plus the rotten corruption amongst the top elite is also far worse than I had expected. The island where I was working was Sarawak, it is run as a personal fiefdom of the Sarawak minister who has been in charge for about 25 years, he owns all the big companies here and has all the logging concessions and anything that makes money he has to take a cut of the proceeds, he is unofficially the richest man in Malaysia, he should be arrested and jailed for life for how he has exploited this island. It is being despoilt at an alarming rate, it is the centre of the forest destruction in the far east and when I arrived the whole region was under the smog of the burning forest and this is government approved. How can this be allowed to continue, the palm plantations are built on indigenous land, the people are just herded off and then it is cleared, they get no compensation and are left totally poverty stricken, this is a crime against humanity, but as it is part of the so called democratic world it is allowed to continue, shame on the rest of the world for allowing them to do this.

Observation of the people, the Malays are a pretty average sort of folks, short dark skinned and with a large head, but one thing I did see is an unimaginable amount of Acne, some of the worst cases I have ever seen. I have also seen some shocking cases of facial warts that a wicked witch of the west would be proud of, the police woman who was running the scanning machine at the airport had the biggest wart on the end of her nose I have ever seen, the size of a small birds egg, it really was directly on the end of her nose, most unfortunate for her as it made her already unattractive face quite hideous, this should be a case of enforced plastic surgery to save the public from such horrors.

The food which I though was good is actually just the Chinese food, the Malaysian style is pretty average and non-descript but the Chinese stuff is like Thai style and spicey and tasty and delicious, the Tom Yam Soup I had at a local bar was just unbelievable and exotic. I went back 5 times for the same soup and my last night there was only prevented by the job having a few problems. I love fried rice but after eating it every lunch for 40 days I am just about done for a year or two. Maybe the plain stuff in Australia will give me an appetite again, but the town of Karratha has a great Thai restaurant.

My First Identified Bird for Malaysia

I have identified a new bird for me, it is a Oriental Magpie Robin, on the site which is huge with lots of cut grass areas, we have many of these birds hopping about picking off the flies and insects, a beautiful bird that sings really well, so nice to hear it while working such long hours.

Lovely active bird, beautiful whistle also

Getting Ready to Leave For Oz

Well it is that time of project again, I am starting to look at packing and clearing all the shite that has accumulated on my table in the hotel, what can I see here, 7 bottles of water, a half eaten packet of potato chips, two half eaten bags of jellies and a pile of papers from my laptop bag that need sorting out someday, my clothes bag looks like a land mine was placed beneath it and detonated, things are hanging out in a very disorderly fashion, I was asked a good question by a young guy on site today, he asked if I liked my job, I told him I have a fantastic job, I get to travel the world see different places work on huge prestigious projects and work on modern high tech plants and equipment and as a contractor i don't have to answer to anyone apart from my wife. He seemed quite impressed about what i do and where I go and he said he was motivated to do something along the same lines, he is tied to a contract with his employer though for 10 years as The company paid for him to go through university, he did say that if he was prompted he would leave and pay back his debt, but he seems quite happy for now, oh the joys of being a young engineer, life is so easy for them, no responsibilties, no worries about wives and children, no house bills to pay nothing to stop them having a good time, for me well I lose sleep about many crazy things that rush around my head, but my wife seems to think I prefer to be away working rather than be at home, but nothing is more from the truth, but my work ethic is such that i cannot and couldnot sit about at home for long extended periods, i need to work for my mental health and Jenny refuses to accept this, maybe one day she will understand,

So it is off to Australia in winter even though it is 30 C where i am going to work but the humidity is pretty low compared to here and I have a reasonable supermarket behind my hotel where I can get beer and Yoghurt for breakfast, as there is no restaurant in the hotel, we will see when i manage to get away from Karratha this time, maybe for Christmas

How Fragile Life is

I have been working very long hours here and I am only working and sleeping, nothing else, I do it for a few reasons, mainly for the money, the job is really interesting but i am worn out with the long hours but i enjoy what I do and the travel is also interesting. But you sometimes have events that make you think about what your doing, a woman who was working on site as grass cutter was found gasping for breath and going blue, it turned out to be an asthmatic and she only had an empty inhaler, the ambulance took more than 25 minutes and the guys who found her picked her up and took her in a car to the site clinic, but she died before she got there, she was thinking about the money she was making that morning on her way to work, maybe even what she was going to buy with the money, but she never made it home and I do think about the possibility of me having an accident, either travelling about, flying or driving in crazy countries, or dying in an explosion in a refinery or a poisonous gas cloud, life is like that, the mystery of not knowing. its like my idea that the more others die the better odds I get of living longer. Sad but a pretty obvious result of others misfortune. I am still travelling to Australia on the 13th of September, beer and barbies here we come.