Hi Folks and welcome to volume 2 of my Sfaxian Tales. At the time of writing I was consulting to BG Tunisia, helping them to complete an upgrade to their offshore facilities. It had been going on for some time and was running a little late.  I was living at their onshore facility near Sfax and looking for ways to accelerate progress. It was very interesting and I met some really good guys. I did feel like a bit of an outsider, but that’s probably because I was.  No one likes some smart arse being parachuted in to save the day and at this stage, I was an unknown quantity. As it happens, I remain firm friend with many of the guys I met, but this was early days. And so on with volume 2.

The Rains.

Greetings All,

And a great big hello from sunny Sfax in Downtown Tunisia!!!

Its been a funny old week. Frustrating, wet, uncomfortable and largely disappointing on a work front, but still, its better than being bored. Oh and I moved from my little shared bungalow into a much more upmarket bigger one.

This week should have seen our accomodation rig arrive on station so that I could start to expend heaps and heaps of manhours off-shore, close the project down and come home  – a BG hero – back to the bosom of my adoring family.

Or something like that anyway.

Sadly it didn’t happen. The rig I had been looking at;  a rust bucket owned by a well known Croation company, is an absolute dead loss. So, I don’t think it is likely to happen this week or indeed this year or ever.  At least not without BG intervention and their spending millios to make it seaworthy. And then I doubt it could be here before late january 2005.

So my mission this coming week is to make a proposal to the BG board to spend even more cash and get a proper, fit for purpose Floatel. Not the easiest of challenges, but if I was able to convince My darling wife  to let me have a shotgun and a sports car, I can do anything!!!!

The good news is I have to fly to the UK to talk to the Floatel owners and then visit TVP in Reading to give my presentation. So I will be home for Christmas a few days earlier than expected. Hoorah. The bad news is,  if I am successful, I’ll probably have the Russian and Croation mafia after me, for canning their rotten stinking pile of rust which is still languishing in Malta. Still, you have to take the rough with the smooth.

Of course, the upshot of all this is that the schedule will slip – again so I’m going to be out here longer than expected.

This week also saw some torrential rain. It was amazing. Trouble when it rains in the dessert is that the ground quickly turns to porridge and the water starts to run off, creating numerous new rivers. Some of which are quite deep and very fast. Certainly, for the next few days, everywhere you go, everything is covered in thick gloopy mud. Of course it soon dries out and covers everything in orangy red dust. It also makes the roads even more interesting to drive on as they are so shiny, in the wet they become  very slick. The fact that most of the Tunisian cars have bugger all tread on their tyres doesn’t help and the final element in the equation is that the locals drive even faster than usual to get home out of the rain. Thinking about it, a final, final  aspect is that the hard shoulder isn’t any more. The hard shoulder is just compacted sand and mud. So in the rain, it turns into a bog, so if you tried to drive onto it, you’d sink upto the axels. Hence your escape route in case of emergency has disappeared. Makes life interesting I can tell you!

The other aspect to the rain, is that the bungalows we live in are made of metal sheet. So in the rain, its like living in a drum. The noise is deafening, although having said that I found it strangely relaxing. I slept much better the nights it was chucking it down and beating a tatoo on the roof. I’m obviously  just strange.

At least the rain clears the air a bit. It is horrible the amount of pollution around here. Sfax is the Middlebrough of Tunisia. Heaps of nasty chemical works with no anti polluton controls. Hence Sfax is a cancer hot spot and Sfaxians typically have a much shorter life expectancy than other Tunisians. Except perhaps Tunis taxi drivers.

Tunisia is actually a very beautiful country with some wonderfully diverse landscapes and environments. Trouble is,  its also a giant rubbish tip. Show a Tunisian an empty piece of ground and he’ll show you, an empty plastic bottle, a fag packet, an old carrier bag, a car tyre and probably a single, slightly damaged sandle. Then after showing them to you, he’ll proceed to chuck them on the ground and wander off. He may also show you a pile of bricks and proceed to build a wall on your empty patch.

View of Bedouin and Camels at Sunset, Douz, Sahara Desert, about 280 Kim’s from Sfax and a fun cross desert drive.

I’m coming to realise that the national passtime in Tunisia is bulding walls. There are walls everywhere. Usually they don’t actually go around anything, they are just, well, there. Just there because they can be. I mean some of them are very good walls. Extremely well built, possibly capable of withstanding a nuclear blast. These are substantial walls.  Often in a  straight line and usually in the middle of nowhere. Just starting and then finishing in a  vague fashion a few meters further along. Then, another Kilometer further down the road, in the middle of a bit of dessert, another chunk of wall!!!! I suppose it vies with the other national passtime which is sitting around doing bugger all. They do that really well too. If there was ever an Olympic event for sitting around and staring at you , Tunisia would be the walkaway gold medalists everytime. These guys can sit and stare for days without moving. You often have to go and poke at them just to make sure they are still alive.  Of course, unemployment is high. National service is a means of keeping young men with nothing to do and whom might otherwise become disillusioned and radicalized, better occupied. And the chief occupation seems to be building walls.  Odd.

This week also saw my first dose of “Sfaxian revenge” Not pleasant. I blame it on myself however. I told the chef at the camp I like spicy food. So every evening now, I get extra spice in my meal. Thursday saw a special treat of deep fried chilli’s. My God!!!! By the time I chomped my way through the first one in that, oh so British, cant possibly offend the guy by being sensible and telling him to poke them way, I thought I was dying. Bright red, sweating like the preverbial and desperate for painkillers!!! At least I couldn’t taste the bloody awful beer afterwards – or for days later thinking about it.  A few hours later, I wished I was dying.  I got lots of exercise that night and not much sleep. I eventually grabbed an hour or two and awoke a much lighter man. I have since recovered. I am no longer walking like I have something large and jagged inserted where the sun doesn’t shine and my sense of taste has returned.  Not that that is necessarily a good thing.

The final hilight of the week was my move from B21 to F14. From my shared batchellor pad, to my designer family unit. In fact, they are identical in everyway other than the new place has an extra bedroom I don’t need and smells faintly of cat pee. Oh and the shower leaks. Apart from that, I’m really pleased with the move.

So until next time my little chums, Au revoire et bon noel etc

Graham