Redneck wrote: ↑Sat Jan 22, 2022 3:22 pm
Valkie wrote: ↑Sat Jan 22, 2022 2:55 pm
sprintcyclist wrote: ↑Sat Jan 22, 2022 2:17 pm
Valkie wrote: ↑Sat Jan 22, 2022 12:35 pm
J o h n S m i t h wrote: ↑Sat Jan 22, 2022 10:48 am
and yet everyone I've ever spoken to who has traveled extensively says it's their favourite place ever ..... and three of them have been to almost every country you'd care t name bar some in the ME.
funny how ones perspective changes when they're not racist little maggots suffering from a Napoleonic complex
There are tourist areas where the protection is virtually absolute.
But just try going into the parts of the country where there is mining or other activities.
My travel seldom saw tourist areas.
Work such as mining rarely is done in tourist areas.
So I visited areas of many countries where I got to see the "real country" not what that country wanted to present.
The world is much larger than tourist resorts.
Every now and then a mining camp in Africa gets attacked by 'rebels'.
Workers get murdered
Its hard to sleep when you can hear the shouting and occasional gunfire.
No big booms or bangs, just crack, crack, crack.
I dont know, nor do I want to know if anyone was hit or killed.
But it was a horrible feeling that people were being shot at.
I also did some time in New Guinea, about 13 years ago.
Getting off the small plane and walking past tge wire fence.
All the blacks were smiling and showing their teeth.
They were blood red, but at the time i had no idea what that meant.
At the "secure" compound at the mining site, I was informed about the beetle nut.
They chew this crap all the time and dip sticks into lime and eat that with it. Its a drug, and a bad one.
At the "secure" compound the room I was given had had the aiconditioning ripped out the night before.
There was no lock on the door, it had been smashed in.
And this was a good room, at least it was near the centre of the camp and therefore safer.
The mine, was a horror.
They killed several people a month, no problem, no investigation, nothing.
I was there for 4 days and 3 nights.
Never went back, will never go back.
At least in Russia, although they had a rather blase attitude to safety, and alcohol was common in the mine.
They at least looked after each other and you could go anywhere in relative safety.
Accommodation was at the low end, but the guys were quite nice once you got to know them.
And they love practical jokes.
Sound like you have led a very interesting life Valkie!
Love your stories!
I have had a very interesting life.
Through my engineering and mechanical background, and being fortunate enough to work for a multinational company, i saw a great deal of the world that i would never had seen otherwise.
Most was just day to day stuff.
Fly in, go to meetings or factories, stay a few weeks, then fly out, at best , boring.
But occasionally there were adventures.
Like when i lost my baggage in Russia and had to buy clothing for the next three weeks travel.
Or when we lost one of our workers in Nigeria, I spent a lot of time in embassies and police stations with several senior managers.
We never found him, he was assumed killed.
Arrested in China by mistake, many heartfelt apologies from the Chinese for that one. ( he did look a lot like me, grey beard, bald, etc, except he had brown eyes and mine are blue.)
But on the whole it was simply travel, sleep, work, travel.
Not as exciting as you might think.
The worst trip was from Turku, to Helsinki, 4 hour layover, Helsinki to London, 2 hour meeting, 3 hour wait for flight, London to Dubai, 2 hour layover, Dubai to Sydney.
With flights nearly 42 hours without seeing a bed.
In Australia, I have seen many underground and open cut mines in NSW, SA, QLD and WA.
But in Australia, the mines are generally well managed and as safe as humanly possible.
But no matter how tough you may think you are, dropping into a hard rock mine by mine lift, or travelling down an incline into a coal mine in pitch black is always a little bit scary.
The safety training that is compulsory, and the stories they tell always plays on your mind.
Before the new oxygen tanks, you had to carry a re-breather.
This was a device you took out of a belt canister and put in your mouth.
Through chemical exchange, it converted the problem gas in the mine into a "breathable" oxygen mix.
Apparently, the chemical mix gets seriously hot, hot enough to burn your throat and mouth, but you can breath hey!
Never used one, but scared me to death.
Roof falls scare the shite out of you and happen frequently.
And roof bolts can build up so much tensile stress that they snap and fire into the floor like bullets.
But australian mines are still leaps and bounds safer than many other countries.
We have huge seams, some up to 6 metres thick.
But one mine in the US has 3 foot seams.
That means that the mi ing equipment was only 3 foot high, you lie down to work tge machines, if something goes wrong, you cant run out, you have to crawl out. Had my first real dose of claustrophobia there.
The salt mines are amazing, but you come out with very sore sinuses and throat. But tgey are surprisingly pretty.
Yep, i had some experiences all over the world.
Most good, some not so, some scary.
But it has been, (An interesting life)
