In the northern desert of Saudi Arabia...

Morning all,

Here is an update from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. I finally arrived on-site on friday after spending two days in Jeddah doing nothing as I managed to miss my flight... (See previous entry...)

The place where is am is remote to say the least. I'm somewhere 80 km from Turaif and 200 km from Arar. It is really in the middle of nowhere. We are also only about 50 km from the southern border of Iraq. The airport in Arar is small to say the least. One shed is all there is. At least no queues anywhere.

I was picked up by the company driver from CNBM, the chinese construction company that is running the job. The guy was very friendly but conversation was limited as he only spoke arabic or chinese, both of which are not my strong point... Didn't stop us from jabbering and doing a lot of handsignalling hahahahaha!!!

After bombing through the desert for two hours we got to the site. As it was already late on in the day I met the site guys just to say hello and was then shown to my 'engineers quality' accomodation. Basic to say the least but is it sufficient. At least there is heating in it which I really need as the temperature is hovering around the freezing point which is weird for Saudi Arabia. I'm used to it being boiling here, normally it is around 45 degrees celsius in the Riyadh region but here it is ^$%$king cold. There was even some snow on the ground...

This is a piccie of my digs. Note the 2 by 4's for bed posts...

This was what it looked like for two hours between Arar and the site... Basically sand, rocks and camels... Impressive in a strange sort of way... We could have been on a different planet...

This is the cement plant control room. On the left is our system. (Strange chairs they have here...)

This is the kiln outlet of kiln 1. You can see the scale of the thing by looking at the two techie's standing on the edge of the burner platform.

These are the two technicians that are working with me. To my shame I have to say that I have not managed to remember their names, I have a crap memory. I think the guy on the right is Mr Jao. The guy on the left is the electrician that is doing the technical part of the installation.

The work itself is going fine. Most is already installed and the control room equipment is working fine. We do have a problem though. For me to be able to do temperature calibrations I need the kiln to be up and running. Unfortunately they had a catastrophic power failure which meant that the kiln will not restart till the end of february. So I probably will have to come back here in a month or so to finish the job off...

The food has been excellent, chinese for breakfast, chinese for lunch and guess what? Chinese for dinner. There are about 800 chinese workers here doing the construction.

OK, gotta get on with it, take care,

Alex in freezing Saudi Arabia.