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!

Getting some work done, and some driving!

31st August 2012

Having a lot of fun here now that work has started! Unfortunately I can't write anything about the project but I'm getting a lot of good experience! The temperatures do get very hot though when you are out standing in the sun for four hours minimum! At least for me the breeze is quite cool, so it is just like Wellington on a very hot but windy day.

Last night we invited an Australian guy and a New Zealander and American living with him over for some drinks, we had lots of fun. Some of the New Zealanders who are living with us were in the NZ army and SAS and they had some great stories to tell, as you can probably imagine.
The Australian, Angus, said they were going to leave soon to go to some another gathering of ex-pats to continue drinking, but we convinced him to invite them over to our house instead. So eventually three girls turned up, Abby, Amy and Fleur. Fleur was a New Zealander, Amy was Irish and Abby was English. Together we made up well more than half of the ex-pat population!

We also met an Afghani guy Rouf's family, they are extremely influential in Bamyan and they were very hospitable to us. Rouf's father used to be the Mayor of Bamyan, and was a Governor before that in both Bamyan and another province, so he is very well respected around the area. They served us fresh grapes and watermelon while we were there, it was the first time we had had fruit in over a week!

I also had a go at driving around the town! It was really weird driving a left hand drive and staying on the right side of the road, but the most annoying thing I found with the car (a Toyota Landcruiser) was just the amount of pressure I had to put on the accelerator for it to start revving. I had to press very hard just to stop rolling backwards if I was stopped on an uphill slope. Then there were the brakes. If I pressed too hard on them they would lock up and the car would just skid forwards or sideways on the gravel roads. Luckily they only locked up once for me and for a very short time in the first minute I was driving so I knew how hard I could press the brakes!
Driving on the roads here is weird though, there aren't really any rules! I overtook a police car because he was going too slow!

The city of screams

A toilet

A wealthy Bamyan restaurant. I went to have lunch there with some of the Afghani staff.

Looking out over Bamyan from one of the solar sites.

Plastic bags used to cover bare wires in the mains box

The fruit we got from Rouf's family, the grapes were very sweet!

Finally in Bamyan!

27^th August 2012

Arrived in Bamyan on the 26^th! Went straight to the hotel we were staying at while the house we are now staying in got finished, not that it has even been finished now that we are staying in it. I shared a room with a New Zealander guy called Tem, who joined us at Dubai on the way to Kabul and is a nice guy, knows his stuff in his field and has really got into the work here with enthusiasm.

We went to another hotel for dinner, where they had a buffet style service. I had this rice dish which is very popular here I think. I’ve had it 3 times in two days! The rice is quite different to anything I’ve had before, it must be a sort of rice that we either don’t have in New Zealand, or one my Mum just doesn’t cook with. It was cooked with lemon/orange rind, raisins and goat! The goat was quite tough, but not bad tasting really. The naan bread is amazing too, especially if you get it off a street vendor and it has just been made, which it usually is because they are churning them out all the time.

In the morning Tem and I both woke up at around 5.30 (though the staff did not speak very much English at all), so we went to the restaurant to get something to eat but there was no one there! We had been told they open at 5 so the timing shouldn’t have been an issue. We went back to our room though and I checked again at 6, there were other people having breakfast there so we came back and sat down. Naan bread and some of my favourite ever carrot jam and happy cow cheese were brought out for us. We saw that the other customers had some omelettes though so we tried ordering those, and eventually got our meaning across. It was a really nice omelette! Quite oily though. That cost 50 Afs, which is about US$1, so about NZ$1.25 I guess (not too sure about the exchange rates at the moment), but when you realise that the average wage in Afghanistan is about US$5 per day the locals must really be amazed how much us foreigners spend.

We had a tour around Bamyan at about 10, which was a lot of fun and very interesting. We went up to the top of one of the hills were we could see a panoramic view of the valley that Bamyan is in. The unsealed airport on the far left, through to the poorest part of the town, which is in one of the poorest regions of Afghanistan, which is one of the poorest places on Earth! They still had satellite dishes on their roofs though! Some even had little solar panels! This place used to be on the Silk Road, which was the biggest trade route in the world for quite some time, so it used to be really rich (comparatively). There are these two amazing outlines cut into the cliff faces in the area, called the Buddhas. 

According to legend though, and many, many people believe it is true, there is a third Buddha (named “The Lying Buddha” - not sure if it is meant like lying down or telling untruths) that had been hidden to protect it from plunderers because there was more gold than in Tutankhamen’s tomb hidden in the Buddhas and surrounding area. This is so widely believed to be true because there are many accounts of its existence from lots of places around the world. Many people have tried to find it – you need special permission to do try – but no one has ever found it.

We moved in to our permanent house in the afternoon. We hadn’t done that yesterday because the workers had poured too much concrete into the walls of the septic tank and so it hadn’t set properly when they tried to take the plywood containing walls out, letting the unset concrete spill out over the whole thing. Luckily, today that was fixed and, while the house is habitable, we are probably going to be finding faults with it for a while. For instance, tonight we could hear a tap running – one of the upstairs showers had started going by itself! That wasn’t the biggest problem though, while we didn’t get flooding because we caught it in time, we did find out that some of the drains around the house were clogged. The Afghan workers had let so much glue spill into the pipes that it had hardened and completely blocked them off! Luckily for us we don’t have a house made of mud, because those things start to dissolve very fast in water. You need to make serious repairs on them every 3 years, and completely replace the house in 15. This is a place where it hardly ever rains too! If you get a leak in one of those houses though, you can wake up and just have your wall completely gone!

At the moment we are running a generator for power, and that’s getting shut off very soon so I’ll have to stop writing now, and it’ll be my job to rig up solar to our house!

I’m going to upload all my pictures to Facebook, just a few of them here, because I took a lot! I’m also going to be getting a new camera to use soon, 14 megapixels instead of the 5 megapixel one on my phone, has optical zoom too so should get some much better pictures soon!

The city of screams!

The real work is about to start!

25th August 2012

Well, it's been a while since I last updated my blog! The week in Dubai was great, unfortunately though, I walked into the pool with my phone in my shorts still, so I was out of contact for a few days! Luckily it dried out and is now working perfectly again, so no harm done!

We didn't actually do too much in Dubai, our general schedule consisted of
9am - Buffet Breakfast
11am - Pool
1pm - I'd generally try to skype Chloe
7pm - We would go out for dinner!

One night we went to a place in the Dubai mall and had goat and hummus, which was actually really nice! We were sitting next to this amazing dancing fountain too, to shoot the most powerful jets of water it used pressurised air and so it made huge bangs.

At the moment I am back in Kabul, about to head to a power pole production facility before we go to Bamyan to actually get started! Apparently I have a structural engineering problem to do when I get there! Looking forward to actually doing some work, even if we are only going to be there for a few weeks.

Anyway, I have to go, I'll edit this post later with captions on the pictures

Skittles, about 1/4 of the NZ price here

A list of the shops in the Dubai mall

The breakfast buffet

Our $40 per person yum cha

Gigantic tv!

Relaxing in the pool

The dancing fountain

Back to Dubai, and lots of pictures!

19th August 2012

Me and Tony have flown back to Dubai, to pick up his girlfriend Karen. I was a little bit nervous in the Kabul airport because we had heard that there was an attack on it planned for later that day, Tony said there was nothing to worry about though - lucky for me it didn't happen! So we got on the plane just fine. We were served our breakfast about a half hour in to the 2 hour flight, and that meal made me realise why everyone complains about airplane food. There was what I think was a rehydrated omelette with a rubbery white meat which I think was chicken inside it, some bread in the shape of a croissant and carrot jam to go with it!

We decided to stay at the Media One hotel this time, which is more central in the city, and 4 stars. To get back to Afghanistan, we have to renew our visas, but it is their equivalent of Christmas at the moment, 'Eid'. This will last for 3-5 days, but the Afghanistan government is more likely to have 5 days off rather than 3. That is unfortunate for Tony, because the weekend in Afghanistan is on Thursday and Friday! That means that we will have to wait until Saturday to get our visas, and fly back to Kabul on Sunday, and to Bamyan on Monday. I don't really mind though, because Dubai is really amazing!

If the government only has a 3 day Eid holiday then that means the Embassy will be open on Wednesday, so we can fly to Kabul on Thursday.

The media one hotel is really nice, I have in-room WiFi, a TV, a desk that swings in to give you more room and an en suite. I'm on the 13th floor and have a nice view of the city and sea! On the 8th floor there is a gym, restaurant and an outdoor pool! I've been in the pool a couple already, because it feels so good.

Anyway, enjoy the pictures!

Kabul from the air

This was probably the worst airplane food I've had

Carrot Jam

Lobby of the Media One Hotel

View from my bedroom

View from my bedroom

My Bedroom

Attached bathroom

Welcome message on my tv

The room comes with an iPod docking station

Millac Maid "Tastes like fresh milk"!

Patterned windows in the 8th floor restaurant frame the scenery

Tony in the restaurant

Restaurant

My buffet breakfast

The pool is a welcome relief from the heat!

The pool is also 8 floors up!