Schedules and certainty do not exist in Afghanistan.

15th September

Sorry for the long wait between blogs! I have had plenty of interesting things happen to fill you all in on though.

On the 7th we went to a place called Band-e Amir and it was absolutely amazing! Band-e Amir is a region inside Bamyan and it has these 6 lakes that are pretty big. Nobody has ever measured how deep they go though because there are trenches that just go down and down, zig-zagging on the way. I guess it is like the terrain on the surface but just transposed underwater. We went to have a picnic there and we found a little outcrop that had a great view of the area.

The first we saw of the lakes

The whole lake is raised up above the ground by an outcrop of rock, It is about 30 metres tall at the highest point and there are some amazing pictures of it in the winter.

The lake is at the top of that cliff...

Fish!

Lunch time!

On the way back we visited the rangers' cabin for the Band-e Amir National park. The only wildlife reserve in Afghanistan. And it isn't even funded by the government - I have no idea who pays the rangers. They have to cover tens of thousands of square metres of hilly terrain with no vehicles whatsoever.

Ibex on the far left and Marco Polo ram skulls along the bottom in the rangers cabin

Other than that we have had lots of work to do, I've been doing some 4 wheel drive off-road up and along the ridges that we are putting solar panels up on. It's been great fun doing that. We were going to be going to see the buddhas yesterday, and the City of Screams, but because of that anti-Islamic tape we decided that it was prudent to stay at home, there had been protests in the bazaar earlier that day. So instead I just sat inside the whole day on my computer.

I'm getting pretty close to the end of my time here, in fact, I was supposed to be back in Dubai on Friday! We are having a lot of trouble getting flights out of here because there aren't any commercial airlines. You have to be registered with the UN or another service like USAID if you want to get out. The person who was supposed to register me for flights last Sunday instead decided to resign, so we have been trying to register some other way. As well as that, you have to give at least 48 hours of notice before catching a flight. 

We registered on Thursday evening but Friday and Saturday are the weekend in this part of Afghanistan and so the pilot will have had his list of passengers already. We are going to try and catch the flight in the afternoon tomorrow (the 16th) but it is very unlikely that we will get on it. The next one is Tuesday, which is when my flight leaves Dubai to come back to New Zealand...

This means that I'm going to have to reschedule my flight home and I probably won't get back until Friday or Saturday.

It is incredibly frustrating!

Links to places I talk about:

-Band-e Amir http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Band-e_Amir

-The Buddhas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhas_of_Bamiyan

Wikipedia links because school can't tell me what not to do.

Mountain Dive

6th September 2012

So my days so far have been fairly repetitive I guess, apart from my 1 year anniversary with Chloe on the 4th! I do wish that I could have been at home for that, but that wasn't really possible...

I generally go out with the Sustainable Energy Services Afghanistan (SESA) staff members in the mornings and watch them do their thing while I get a tan. Then in the afternoon I stay around the office or go out with someone else who has something to do and see all the behind the scenes things that go on in a project like this.

When we went shopping at the supermarket right at the start of the project we got what we thought was Mountain Dew. But then one night I looked at the label and it wasn't it was actually Mountain Dive!

We went for a walk around one day, having a look at some power lines that were already put up by a previous project that had to be scrapped and we found these kids. The problem is, if you show them any attention, like we did, then they will just keep following your around and get more and more confident.

They eventually started running up to Tem and trying to steal his drink bottle and unzip his bags to take things from inside. I could just imagine him doing something like Shrek on Shrek 2 and roaring at them, "I'm an Ogre! AAAAAAARRRRRGGGHHH!" Luckily Alpha knows how to say "Fuck off!" in Dari and they left us alone after that. There were plenty more kids to come though.

Things are going well though, and I'm expecting to be back in Wellington on about the 17th of September!

Plates of moulded shit, definitely from donkeys, not sure if there is human in there too...
They use it for firewood. I'm sure it is a great scent.

They have a soccer field set up on the outskirts of their village, the road goes right through the middle of it.

The tunnel under the airport, it is too small to stand up straight in.

Trying to get the four wheel drive van up the slope. It's so dusty it's like trying to drive up a sand dune.

Ex-pat parties and altitude training

1^st September 2012

Last night we went out for dinner with a whole bunch of other expats, we must have had the whole community there! Apart from the NZ PRT forces, who aren’t allowed out of their compound except when they are on missions of some kind, I think that I have met all of the foreign community except maybe one or two people!

So we met Angus, Eric, John, Abby, Dave and Fleur again, then there was also a Japanese guy, an American called Tim, and a few other guys who were sitting on the opposite side of our seating area from us so we didn’t get to talk to them. For dinner there was really nice pizza, which was just pizza toppings on top of the naan bread, which seems to work really well as a base and is a good use for leftover naan because it goes pretty hard when it gets cold. We had a roast carrot salad, a pasta salad and a cucumber and feta salad which I tried but thought it was a really odd combination and didn’t really like it. For dessert we had more pizza! Nutella and banana flavour! That turned out to be very, very nice! We also had chilled banana topped with chocolate, sliced and served on toothpicks. I hadn’t had anything sweet in a long time so that was amazing!

I also tried to run up this hill with Tony yesterday, who is built to be a cross country runner. We ran from our house to the hill which was about 700m-1km away and slightly uphill, and I was reduced to walking by the time we got there! Doesn’t help that I’m not that fit at the moment, but the biggest thing was just breathing, we are at 2.600m above sea level here and there is no air! You don’t notice it walking around, but as soon as you start running you start having to really suck air in. I walked back after getting to the first flat bit up the hill, Tony ran over the hill then all the way back home and got back just 5 minutes after me! I’m going to get further up it today though!

Hey, who's that guy??

The hill I tried to run up. You run up on the right then down the ridge all the way
to the left then back. Well, that's what you are supposed to do!