How to vacation in the Middle East (and get paid to do it!)

Update Week 3

The best way to get through a traffic circle here is to take a breath, close your eyes, step on the gas and take your chances.  Those assumptions you might have about everyone going in the same direction, and cars entering the traffic circle yielding to the cars already in it; forget about it.  Signal lights; forget about it. Passing on the left; forget about it.  Imagine if you will, 14 million Arabian men playing high speed bumper cars, and not one woman driver in the whole country. That’s what we have here folks.

I have survived yet another week on the Red Sea coast.  I bought myself a chicken at the market and fried it up which lasted a few meals.  I’ve started taking lunches to the plant to get away from all the rice and stew (lamb, chicken, beef) and for that I make tuna sandwiches and buy fruit when we go to Jizan once a week.  One of my highlights this week was the discovery of Philippino hopias, which are small hard puck- like pastries filled with different fillings like beans, dates or pineapple.  I have tried onion hopias and date hopias this week, both of which were tasty with tea.

Hopias

Tuesday night after work we went into Baysh village and had dinner in a Turkish Restaurant.  Apparently no women are allowed inside because they sit with their children on the curb, covered head to toe in black like a bunch of ninjas, waiting for their sons and husbands to finish eating.  We had souvlaki  style wraps, beef and chicken kabobs and fries for dinner, along with all the hummus and Arabian bread we could dip. Young beggars, children, waited at the door and watched us eat, pointing at us and discussing who was going to cling on to whom when we left.   We gave them our plates of left overs and got through them okay this time, but once before, with no food in our hands, they clinged on to our clothing and wouldn’t let go unless we gave them money.

Arabian Bread - A staple here along with hummus (also a staple!)

What we would call Souvlaki, is actually a Turkish fast food... barbequed meats wrapped in Arabian bread. "Kapoks"

Kabobs

And now for our Friday activity this week.  Myself, 10 Finns and a Portuguese  fella drove an hour or two southeast to a canyon just north of the Yemen border.  It is called Wadi Lahab or another name for it is The Rift Valley, known for its high mountain passes, narrow canyons and flash floods.

From the parking lot which is a couple kilometers off the highway, we started walking, rock hopping, swimming across pools (back packs held high) and climbing cliffs. We swam through caves and climbed underground waterfalls upstream with blinding water splashing our faces and running down our backs.  We scaled and climbed cliffs, jumped canyon walls and boulders the size of cars and houses. We swam through small holes with barely enough room to squeeze through. It was physically demanding but well worth it. I started out in Jeans and work boots but quickly learned that this was the wrong combination because I bravely stepped in a pool and disappeared. It was such a struggle to get back to solid ground. (I don't know how they do it in the movies because I damn sure can't swim well with boots and jeans on...) Thereafter I swam bare foot with my boots tied and looped around my neck, and my backpack perched on my shoulders.

Antii, Juoni and Mika

This is the entrance to Ladi Wahab (Rift Valley)

This is me soaked to the skin after many swims through pools that were deeper than I am tall. 



L-R Bottom:  Myself, Mika, Karri and Matti,  Top: Petri, Ricardo, Jari, Jouni, Antii and Jonas

Jari

Mika

Karri

And so it begins, another week in Saudi Arabia. My visa only permits me to be here for 30 days at a time so I booked a flight to Dubai on Feb 4th for 2 nights which will be a nice break. Work is going fine as I try to pull an out-of-touch corporate health and safety team into alignment with my department and the people who are doing the work. It is less the credentials I have and more my ability to get people to work together that serve me best in my role as OHS Manager.

These are SARs (Saudi Arabian Riyals) One Riyal is about 38 cents Canadian

Local Market in the village where I walk for fresh fruit and veggies after work.

Seemingly wild camels roam the countryside...

Local Monkeys here, known by the Finlanders as "Red-Assed Monkeys"...

The titanium smelter in which I am presently employed...

Up in Smoke

Up in Smoke - Kevin smokes the Hookah

Weekly update:  Days are a predictably humid 32 C with nights only a few degrees less. I change my shirt mid day because it is stuck to me and I have to watch out for heat rash in my armpits and the back of my knees.  But there is no snow!  I should buy a thobe, the loose cotton, long-sleeved, ankle-length garments worn here. The worst part is that this is the coldest it will get here, and highs will be going up to 50 C. Whewww!
Mornings start at about 5:30 am when I make my own breakfast (we go to Jizan City about an hour south once a week for groceries, where the "Panda" is similar to one of our grocery stores with the exception that there is no pork or alcohol (both are prohibited within Saudi Arabia's borders) and the few women seen are covered head to toe in black abayas, save for their eyes... one ran into me with a shopping cart.
I commute to work with my Finnish counterparts, an O&M Team (Operations and Maintenance) from Finland, for which I am responsible to keep safe.  It is about 30 km from our housing complex to the plant and the drive can be challenging given the lack of driving rules and enforcement.  Vehicles weave in and out on either side of the road at speeds over 120 km/hr.  Potholes and speed bumps are not marked.  We pass at least two security checkpoints as we arrive in Jizan Economic City, a massive industrial initiative surrounding a port on the main Red Sea shipping route.  The titanium ore for the smelter I work in is shipped from Africa, smelted here and sent on to become artificial hip joints in other countries.

A Mosque being built down the road from my place

Welcome to Jizan Economic City

Walking the mall in Jizan (prayer time - all stores close for about 25 minutes)

A sea of abayas

Non-Alcoholic Budweiser is available in restaurants

Thursday after work, seven Finns and myself drove in two vehicles to Jizan.  Though we drove at top speed and try as we might to make it to a restaurant before prayers (They have five prayer times every day based on a difficult to read prayer table and depending on how far they are from Mecca), we didn't make it in time and had to kill about 25 minutes in the mall across the street.  The stores, which of course were closed, were high end with high fashion ladies wear, purses and jewelry being the main theme.  Dinner was disappointing; we ate at TGIF and I had the soggiest oiliest burger I have ever eaten.
After dinner we raced across the city to a shisha place the guys have frequented before, arriving as it were, at prayer time again.  A sympathetic security guard snuck us in the back door and we enjoyed a relaxing mint-flavoured smoke break served with traditional yellow tea.  Very nice.

After dinner, we found a shisha place and smoked the hookah

Once again it's Gathering Day, my weekly day off and I carried my one cardboard box full of dirty work clothes to our camp washing machine and did my laundry. Its now drying in the sun on a rack at my doorway while I read Khaled Hossein's "The Kite Runner"... A great read about betrayal, guilt and redemption... about a cowardly boy from Afghanistan who seriously neglects his best friend in his early life only to find out that he was actually his brother in his later life.

Tonight we played football (ie soccer) at a local soccer pitch.  It was the Finns against the East Indian/Pilipino team (I played for the Indians) and we lost 9-8.. Great game!

One Less Thing to do Before I Die...

Today, my second day in Jizan (also spelled Jazan and Gizan) was actually a day off.  Fridays, better known as Gathering Day or "الجمعة" (Yawm al-Jumʿah) in Arabic are the equivalent to our Saturday and are the one day I will be getting off of work every week.  Saudi's follow the Islamic Calendar which started not on the birth of Jesus, but 622 years later (when the prophet Mohammed migrated from Mecca to Medina) making today's date 28 Rabi'ul Awwal 1437.
That said, I checked off one of those things we all want to do before we die and went for a swim in the Red Sea, named as it is for one of two things; 1)  the seasonal blooms of the red-coloured Trichodesmium erythraeum (Sea Dust) near the water's surface or 2) a theory favored by some modern scholars is that the name red is referring to the direction south, just as the Black Sea's name may refer to north. The true answer is lost to history.  A beach north of us is closed to swimming following a fatal shark attack.  The word is that sharks are getting hungry due to over-fishing which causes large sharks to hunt closer to shore.  As well, tourist boat operators throw dead fish overboard for shark-photo opportunities, and I also read reports of ships throwing dead livestock overboard, not that I saw any dead cows float by...

The Red Sea is one of the saltiest bodies of water in the world at 40% +/-.  It stung my eyes and throat but was a blast to float around weightlessly on.

Saudi Safety Guy

My new address in Baysh Village about 100 km north of the Yemen border in South Western Saudi Arabia.

Well, I've arrived.  The first week of January 2016 has found me on a 38 hour plane ride chasing the night sky from Calgary to Dubai and onto the village of Baysh in south western Saudi Arabia where I am employed as an EHS Manager at a Titanium smelter.
It was an uneventful series of flights and aside from leaving in a blizzard (my flight from Castlegar was cancelled due to a snow storm; my son Tyler drove me to Calgary), there was nothing that remarkable about getting here.

My new accommodations:

Gated apartment compound in a rural area alongside a busy highway.

Cold water but it works!

My fridge and two burner hot plate.

I can sit on the toilet and shower at the same time!

The drive from Jizan to Baysh took about an hour and was a bit of a white knuckle ride, the traffic being fast and the painted lines, when you can even see them, serve only as a rough guide for which lane to use. Vehicles are often three or four abreast each way on the two lane highway I travelled today with many drivers zigging and zagging between and around other vehicles at dangerous speeds. Horns are honked liberally!